Everyone knew Electrovaya made lithium ion batteries when the company’s expansion into the Jamestown area was announced back a little more than two years ago.

Now, with the first phase of Electrovaya’s Gigafactory in Ellicott open and construction on the rest of the facility underway, Electrovaya is showing signs of moving beyond simply making batteries.

Company officials said when announcing Electrovaya’s second quarter financial results that defense sector activity is becoming increasingly meaningful to Electrovaya’s business outlook. Company officials said they expect revenues associated with one global defense contractor to ramp to multi-million-dollar levels in 2027. Electrovaya is also engaged with two additional defense contractors that are evaluating Electrovaya’s battery technology for multiple use cases. Initial deliveries for robotic applications have commenced to a major robotics OEM. Electrovaya is working with several additional OEMs at earlier stages of evaluation and development, and expects robotics to become an increasingly important component of its long-term growth outlook.

Perhaps the biggest move, however, will be in energy storage. And that move directly involves Electrovaya’s plant in the Jamestown area.

In early April Dr. Raj DasGupta, Electrovaya chief executive officer, announced the company’s participation in a U.S. Department of Energy (“DOE”) funded project led by Binghamton University to develop and demonstrate a next-generation energy storage system for critical infrastructure applications.

The project, supported by a $5 million award from the U.S. Department of Energy under its Critical Facility Energy Resilience (“CiFER”) program, will focus on the design and deployment of a 1.2 MWh battery system. The system will be installed at Binghamton University’s Center for Energy-Smart Electronic Systems (ES2) and integrated into a data center test environment.

Electrovaya will contribute its proprietary Infinity Battery Technology, known for its industry-leading safety and cycle life, to support the development of life cycle cost optimized domestically sourced energy storage solutions optimized for mission-critical applications such as data centers. The project brings together a consortium of industry and research partners, including Electrovaya, LiiON, Eaton Corporation, and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, leveraging expertise across battery technology, power systems, and grid integration.

As is the case in many Electrovaya-related stories in recent years, the company’s Ellicott plant figures into the potential move into providing power for energy storage systems.

“The Jamestown expansion remains a core component of our plans to increase production capacity and support domestic manufacturing, particularly for our future energy storage and defense-related product lines,” DasGupta said during a recent conference call.

Energy storage products are becoming a cornerstone of Electrovaya’s long-term strategy, with its technology positioned to support applications including data centers and high-value commercial and industrial sites. Electrovaya has added dedicated resources to these development efforts and is targeting scaled deliveries of ITC- and FEOC-compliant products in the first half of 2027. DasGupta said Electrovaya has been in talks with several interested parties in trying to fill a niche in the energy storage market that isn’t being well served by current entrants into that market. While most companies are looking at 2-hour or 4-hour energy storage solutions, Electrovaya is looking at longer-term storage. That work is helped by Electrovaya’s Foreign Entity of Concern regulation compliance that makes it eligible for federal energy project incentives – like the project led by Binghamton University.

“There are a lack of solutions for that, in my opinion,” DasGupta said. “So our solutions coming out of the Jamestown plant will be eligible to up to 40% investment tax credits. That’s a very strong incentive. And, finally, it will be a fantastic product. We know these batteries work extremely well and extremely reliably in high-stress environments already. We already have a very good customer roster of folks who are using our batteries inside buildings. Now we’re asking them to use them outside the building.”

It’s easy to talk a big game, but DasGupta is putting his money where his mouth is. Most plants use diesel generators as a backup power source. Electrovaya’s Jamestown plant won’t. In addition to hiring personnel that includes a head of product design, Electrovaya will put the new technology into use at its Ellicott plant.

“We’re going to use these products ourselves,” DasGupta said. “The Jamestown facility, in terms of improving power reliability, which is important for an industrial site such as ours, we’re going to install our own energy storage systems there instead of using diesel gensets, right? So, we are going at this aggressively in terms of hiring people to support it. … I think it can become quite rapidly a very significant part of our business.”

DasGupta said he eyes the new energy storage products being ready in 2027, which is when cell and module production begins in the Ellicott plant as well. While some manufacturing work has begun at the local plant, full production will begin when current construction work is done in the Ellicott facility.

“We’re getting good feedback, good responses,” DasGupta said. “However the product isn’t quite ready yet, right? So we’re in that development phase and hope to bring it to market pretty much coinciding with the start-up of the start-up of the Jamestown plant.”