T1 Energy announced it has entered an agreement to acquire KORE Power, a battery energy storage system company, for $32 million of equity, cash and assumption of debt. The transaction is anticipated to close by the end of this month.
The acquisition will provide T1 with an entry point to the energy storage market. T1 Energy, itself a rebrand of the energy storage company FREYR, currently operates a solar panel assembly facility outside Dallas and is building a solar cell manufacturing facility near Austin, Texas.
KORE Power started as a battery cell technology developer in 2018. The company planned to build a multi-gigawatt-hour capacity battery manufacturing plant in Arizona, intending to become the first U.S.-owned lithium battery plant in the country. Plans for that factory were officially confirmed to be abandoned last year.
During its rise, KORE Power acquired Northern Reliability (NRI), a storage installation and operation brand. KORE’s NRI division is the strategic centerpiece of T1’s acquisition today. The NRI team has deployed over 1,000 BESS projects worldwide and performs its software and controls development within the United States. T1 will rebrand KORE Power as T1 NRI following the acquisition close.
“We’re excited to welcome the NRI team to T1. They possess extraordinary capability, knowledge and customer relationships in the energy storage and power infrastructure markets,” said Dan Barcelo, Chairman and CEO of T1 Energy. “We believe that NRI’s track record, established customer relationships and strategic focus on battery energy storage systems will be complementary to T1’s mission of building domestic solar and battery supply chains to invigorate America with scalable, reliable and low cost energy.”
“The combination with T1 Energy is expected to provide customers with a one-stop solution for generation, storage, system design and ongoing operations,” said Jay Bellows, President and CEO of KORE Power. “We’re thrilled to be joining T1, which shares our commitment to building a secure, domestic energy supply chain.”
