At first glance, the building just off the highway might seem like an empty warehouse. Voices don’t echo here due to the constant humming inside, and some of the only furniture is a stray desk and a sign declaring “safety starts with you” in the back. A signature green banner hails its future name: Battery-NY.

By 2026, this blank space is set to be transformed into a bustling, first-of-its-kind facility for prototyping and developing batteries. From grid storage to automotive power to aerospace and outer space, the facility is designed to support a variety of different battery cell formats and chemistries.

“What’s really key to what we’re doing is that we cover that wide base, and we also give our customers the potential to not only trial existing methods but also develop new methods that might be used in battery manufacturing in the future,” Battery-NY Executive Director Paul Malliband said.

Battery-NY is a cornerstone of New Energy New York (NENY), which won state and federal funding, as well as designations as a Tech Hub and Build Back Better Regional Challenge awardee, for its mission to boost New York’s energy ecosystem and the workforce needed to nurture it. It’s also part of the National Science Foundation-designated Upstate New York Energy Storage Engine, which similarly aims to drive battery development and innovation in the region. Work on the facility is underway, and by the time it goes live, it will pump out new battery prototypes that could one day become industry norms.

Bridging the roads to market

 Entrepreneurs need to start small: a seed of an idea that flowers into a provable, commercializable concept. Research dabbling in new innovations typically happens in smaller-scale laboratories, a process that encompasses the beginning stages of technology readiness levels, or TRLs.

The path from proof of concept to prototype to market can be treacherous. As batteries move up TRLs and upscale, the cost of creation increases, as does risk. “You might start with coin cells, and that might cost you $10,000 for the equipment,” Malliband said. “As you move to the gigafactory scale, you’re talking about billions of dollars of investment.”

Skipping TRLs risks investment with little payoff, while lulls between even initial R&D and pilot production stages are aptly dubbed “valleys of death” for businesses.

“When you come up with an invention, you’ve got to have enough money to do the science, to make sure it works. You don’t have money, it dies,” said Distinguished Professor of Chemistry M. Stanley Whittingham, whose Nobel Prize-winning contributions to the invention of lithium-ion batteries form the foundation of the project. “That’s the first valley of death.”

But pass that and exit the lab successfully, and the next great challenge is to prototype legions of your product on bigger scales — which the U.S. Department of Energy calls the “commercialization valley of death.”

This, according to Whittingham, is where Battery-NY comes in, to support companies fielding the trials that come en-route to market.

“We want to make sure that when a promising technology comes out of that R&D facility, that we’ve got the capability to scale it up straight away,” Malliband said.

So far, facilities like this are few and far between in the United States, where most major battery production happens within companies that aren’t American-owned, due to how expensive building manufacturing facilities can get. Establishing Battery-NY allows American companies to produce their own technology, while creating additional job opportunities in the process.

Battery-NY is supported by both the NENY and Upstate New York Energy Storage Engine coalitions.

“NENY is built on strong partnerships and programs driving battery innovation and strengthening the U.S. supply chain,” said Bandhana Katoch, assistant vice president for entrepreneurship and innovation partnerships and co-PI on NENY. “With Battery-NY’s cutting-edge capabilities, we are positioning upstate New York as a battery innovation hub that will transform domestic battery technology, manufacturing and workforce development to power the future of energy storage nationwide.”

The facility will serve as the hub’s physical touchpoint, according to Whittingham, who is also the Engine’s R&D Pillar Lead. “The Engine provides the R&D leapfrogging technology and the technical skills that will be prototyped in the Center and eventually lead to the manufacturing of batteries made in America by Americans,” he said.

How to plan an effective facility

Had Malliband been tasked with building a facility like this from scratch, he might’ve ended up with a blueprint of a long, straight building, where materials go in one end and come out the other as tested cells.

Where it stands now in Johnson City, Battery-NY will instead be divided into thirds, with each section dedicated to a stage of the battery-building process.

Closest to its loading dock entrance will be mixing lines, where machines mix slurries for anodes on one side and cathodes on the other. All of this takes place inside clean and dry rooms — a series of individual enclosures where customers can prototype and develop their work. Air handling units the size of small houses will dry air from outside and feed it into these rooms as needed, without needing to dry the entire facility.

In the middle of the floor comes the next stage of the process, where the slurry is coated onto conductive sheets, after which calendering machines will roll and squeeze those electrodes together. There will be areas for dry and wet coating, as well as machines to slit electrodes into various sizes for different cell types.

Finally, assembly lines to wind, stack and weld electrodes will take up the final third of the floor, from which pouch, prismatic and cylindrical cells exit. Those finished cells will undergo testing and cycling in order to bring them to life and ensure they can work properly in real-life conditions, such as a driving cycle in a car.

“The key thing is that it allows our future customers to transition from R&D through the mid-TRL levels,” Malliband said. “They’re ready to make the jump to the gigafactory, but they want to do the intermediate steps to make sure they’re able to make the cells on representative equipment — which is what we’ll have here.”

Developing new equipment and processes

With a clear vision in mind regarding its place in the battery-building ecosystem, what’s next for Battery-NY is to expand its team, finalize its layout and then get all its equipment ready for the job.

Malliband keeps several key considerations in mind when planning the kinds of machines capable of doing the work he envisions for Battery-NY. He doesn’t want equipment that is designed for one singular purpose and only ever that purpose — he needs something capable of changing as times, technologies, needs and cell chemistries do.

By incorporating machines that can be flexibly swapped and updated to incorporate new, well-tested technologies, Battery-NY can support improved prototyping methods, while keeping up with an ever-changing industry.

“If solid-state [batteries] are going to be the future, we want to make sure that we’re able to handle it pretty much from day one,” Malliband said. “That might not be with the capability we install on day one, but it should be that we’ve got space to put in the necessary infrastructure to support that.”

This means, however, that some of the equipment Battery-NY needs is not on market shelves. In essence, the team at Battery-NY must work with vendors to develop the equipment they need, based on the cells they want to produce.

“We’re essentially working with a lot of these equipment vendors to develop this capability. Almost starting with a clean sheet of paper to say, ‘Okay, let’s almost reinvent the wheel,’” Malliband said. “‘These are the outputs we need, and these are all the process steps.’”

Moreover, similarly to how smartwatches track your heart rate, or your car’s console tells you more information than you likely want to know about your vehicle, Malliband hopes for Battery-NY’s equipment to come with the ability to track real-time data resulting from battery production processes.

This could mean numbers on the temperature and humidity of dry rooms, the thickness of resulting electrodes or even the amount of vibration inside of machines, which could impact production quality.

“The ultimate vision, really, which we’re working towards, is almost for every cell that we produce here to have a passport,” Malliband said. He anticipates cells out of Battery-NY could have a scannable code on them that will detail the process that went into making them.

Having this data at hand could streamline production, pinpointing in real time any areas that need attention, while allowing future users to trace just what happened to their cell.

“That’s what I’m making sure that we bake into our [equipment] requirements from day one,” Malliband said. “It’s not an afterthought.”

One day, in Battery-NY

While the Battery-NY facility is not finished yet, Malliband already has eyes for how it could possibly expand.

When he first walked through the door of this former newspaper printing plant in Johnson City, he said, “I thought it was a fantastic space. It’s just what we need.”

It was also ideal because of its capacity to grow. “That’s one of the challenges in the battery industry: You think you’ve got enough space, but before you know it, ‘I need more space. I’m bursting at the seams,’” he said.

The facility comes with additional office spaces as well as a room overlooking the roads that used to house the previous building owner’s printing press. The latter contains around 7,000 square feet of additional space where Malliband envisions Battery-NY could expand.

When Battery-NY opens its doors, you might see one company working in a dry room mixing electrode slurries, while at the same time, another customer tests its finished cells at the opposite end of the building. They might be from completely different fields and businesses, but one commonality they share is in using Battery-NY’s space.

“Ford, GM, locals, anybody” can use the facility, Whittingham said, “They just have to be able to pay to use it.”

And the vision is, you’ll end up walking or driving around with a battery that was first prototyped here — built in America by Americans, as Whittingham stated.

“There’s no one that I know in this country that doesn’t have lithium batteries with them all the time,” he said.