France-based IBS to set up lithium-ion battery manufacturing in India, partners Ion Energy for BMS

Mumbai-based Ion Energy, one of the leading company working on advanced battery management and intelligence systems for electric mobility and energy storage applications, has announced the successful launch of IBS, a France based battery pack manufacturer that leverages Ion's technology in all of their batteries.

Coming out of stealth mode, IBS showcased its first electric truck project at the Charade Electric Festival 'New Tech' in France. The company already has over 30-50 megawatt of batteries per year in scheduled deployment over the next 3 years. IBS plans to grow rapidly and emerge as a global leader in battery pack manufacturing, and plans to set up a manufacturing unit in India in 2020-21 and in the United States.

IBS was founded with the objective of developing mobile storage products based on lithium-ion batteries and the electric truck project strongly reinforces IBS’s aim to highlight its competence in building mobile energy storage systems. The electric truck was being designed and developed for over a year along with Socomec, Europe’s leading manufacturer of critical power equipment/UPS systems, who financed the project. The truck is a mobile energy storage unit that is installed with 200 kVA and 300 kWh of energy to enable mobile charging for electric cars on-road and during events.

Ion Energy was one of the first partners of IBS, and its BMS licensing model was the key enabler that accelerated the launch. The company says the partnership extends Ion's BMS licensing offerings to IBS and gives the strategic licensed partner access to a mature BMS which was tried and tested for high voltage applications. This paired with Edison, Ion's analytics, diagnostics, and business intelligence software helped IBS with remote monitoring and servicing, bug reporting, and reporting based on business intelligence data.

By leveraging software analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence Ion Energy says it can improve performance and extend the life of lithium-ion batteries by up to 40 percent. It is helping serious battery pack makers and OEMs to accelerate the development of BMS independently.

Commenting on the launch, Eric Boudot, president and CEO, IBS said: “We have had very strong relations with Ion since the beginning and together we are continuously developing a lot of concepts to build the BMS and communication of the future. We offer not just battery but also service and Edison is the most advanced battery analytics platform as compared to what exists in the market currently. It is custom-built for tomorrow. Batteries are not products that you can transport easily, we want to manufacture where we sell and we’re eager to set up a manufacturing unit and venture into India.”

Akhil Aryan, co-founder and CEO, Ion Energy said: “We are proud to have partnered with IBS as they are always building innovative solutions in the energy storage space. Even right now, they are designing modular and multi-purpose battery packs that can be used for storage as well as mobility. We are excited and confident that this partnership will help us deploy over 100,000+ BMSs by 2020 and have upwards of 1GWh under management on the platform.”