Changes at Redflow ahead of ZCell deliveries

Redflow has announced senior management changes as the company prepares for the first deliveries of ZCell residential flow batteries in Australia. The Redflow board has appointed executive chairman Simon Hackett as acting chief executive officer while fellow board member Richard Aird was named acting chief operating officer.

The appointments were announced after Stuart Smith resigned as CEO following outsourcing of the entire battery manufacturing process to Flex. Smith had joined the company in 2012.

Redflow Director Howard Stack, who was chairman for much of that time, said the company was grateful for Smith's leadership.

"Stuart has led Redflow during a period in which it transformed a promising technology into a world-class battery and outsourced manufacturing to Flex.

"The company is now embarking on the next phase of its development, and with Stuart's departure we have appointed Simon and Richard as acting CEO and acting COO to oversee the delivery of ZCell batteries in Australia and to identify the leadership team to deliver Redflow batteries to the world," said Stack.

Redflow has developed the world's smallest zinc-bromine flow batteries, which are designed for stationary energy storage applications. These range from the ZCell home battery to ZBM batteries for commercial, telecommunications and grid-scale deployment.

Redflow's first shipment of batteries for deployment as ZCell residential flow batteries is currently "on sea" from Flex's factory in North America. Production enclosures for ZCell are currently being manufactured in Australia.

Hackett said Redflow had received strong interest in ZCell, with more than 38,000 unique visitors to the www.zcell.com website since it was launched at the end of March.

"To date, more than 1200 people from around Australia have directly expressed interest in buying ZCell-based energy systems," he said.

"We have received enquiries from more than 380 installers interested in creating solutions based on the ZCell platform. We've already completed two training days with installers.

"Because this is a new technology to the residential market, we are being intentionally selective in our initial installer engagement and training processes. Our aim is to ensure that initial deployments of ZCell solutions are delivered in a cooperative and successful manner. This is pivotal time for Redflow. We need to carefully manage our production ramp-up and product delivery rates to balance with our sales growth across multiple market segments. For a still relatively small company, we are alive to the need to maintain this important balance," he said.