Contest Aims to Advance Innovative New Microbattery Designs and Accelerate Their Commercialization and Integration into Existing Clean Energy Manufacturing Technologies
SAN JOSE, Calif., November 20, 2023 -- Ensurge Micropower (OSE: ENSU, and OTCQB: ENMPY) (“Ensurge” or the “Company”), today announces it has been named one of the winners in the first phase of the U.S. DOE Microbattery Design Prize competition. The company now enters the second of the DOE’s two-phase program, which features a total prize pool of $1.1 million in awards including federal funding.
“We are extremely pleased that the DOE has chosen our microbattery as one of the industry’s leading design architectures,” said Arvind Kamath, Executive Vice President of Technology at Ensurge. “This recognition is a testament to our innovation as well as our engineering team’s hard work in close collaboration with lead customers through successive stages of technology performance testing and evaluation. It also reinforces the strong market and strategic need for this class of microbattery.”
The DOE competition is focused on improving battery performance, safety, and recyclability to support a new era of small, wireless electronic devices used in smart homes, factories, farms, and cities. It also aims to close existing gaps in the microelectronics and energy storage supply chains, which will strengthen both U.S. manufacturing competitiveness abroad and domestic end-to-end supply chains for these technologies.
“This award will significantly elevate the visibility of Ensurge´s battery technology among both private and public financing sources as the company transitions from development to customer deliveries and production scale-up,” said Lars Eikeland, CEO at Ensurge. “The DOE award is yet another important validation of our technology following last month’s recognition by the American Chemical Society, which published a perspective paper describing our solid-state lithium thin-film battery in its prestigious ACS Energy Letters journal. These independent acknowledgements underscore our technology’s value and how crucial its benefits will be for overcoming the limitations of current battery technology so that our customers can launch new waves of innovative products.”
The eight projects in the first phase of the DOE competition were selected based on a review of technical designs and schematics for microbatteries that serve a specific application and deliver performance beyond what is commercially available. Each of the winners was awarded a $75,000 cash prize plus testing services with DOE National Laboratories, and can advance to Phase Two where their prototypes will be evaluated for performance, safety and manufacturing readiness. Learn more about the selected projects here. A winner and two runners up will be selected.
“Microbatteries are becoming more and more crucial for clean energy manufacturing scale-up and smart technology innovation,” said Jeff Marootian, the DOE’s Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. “As our nation rapidly transitions to a clean energy future, the ability for us to domestically produce a wide range of microbatteries is going to be hugely important for achieving the Biden-Harris Administration’s clean energy goals of achieving 100% clean electricity by 2035 and net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.”
The Microbattery Design Prize is led by DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy’s Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office and managed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Visit the Microbattery Design Prize page on the American-Made Challenges website for more information Phase Two contest results will be announced in July 2025.
About Ensurge Micropower
Ensurge is Energizing Innovation™ with the first ultrathin, flexible, reliable, and fundamentally safe solid-state lithium microbattery for the 1 to 100 milliampere-hour (mAh) class of wearable devices, connected sensors, and beyond. The innovative Ensurge Microbattery enables energy-dense rechargeable products that are ideal for form-factor-constrained applications including hearables (hearing aids and wireless headphones), digital and health wearables, sports and fitness devices, and IoT sensor solutions that use energy harvesting to power everyday things. The company's state-of-the-art manufacturing facility, located in the heart of Silicon Valley, combines patented process technology and materials innovation with the scale of roll-to-roll production methods to bring the advantages of Ensurge technology to established and expanding markets.
Contact
Investor Relations
E-mail: IR@ensurge.com
Lars Eikeland, CEO at Ensurge
E-mail: lars.eikeland@ensurge.com
