The Swiss energy servie provider is opening a 3.5 million sq. ft. manufacturing plant in North Carolina, USA which will create 2,500 jobs. The plant will be used to for the building of GridBanks which when combined with advanced analytics, claims to be capable of cutting electricity waste in existing fossil-fuel generation while enabling full use to be made of wind, solar and other renewable energy sources.

Alevo will provide energy services to energy utilities worldwide through the installation of GridBanks, shipping containers of Alevo batteries that can deliver 2 MW of power. When combined with the advanced Alevo Analytics, the GridBanks can be used to optimize entire grids in real time to eliminate up to 30% energy currently lost through inefficiencies and power waste. Core to Alevo’s ability to deliver these energy services is a breakthrough battery technology that is completely non-flammable, and can be charged and discharged with no resting period over 40,000 times (proven in a test environment), reducing the lifetime cost of utility-grade batteries.

The company paid $68.5 million for a former cigarette factory in Concord, North Carolina and is scheduled to begin production in 2015.

“Using a combination of Alevo’s battery and data analytics technologies we have the ability to cut the huge levels of waste experienced in today’s electrical grids”, said Jostein Eikeland, Chairman & CEO, Alevo Group. “What this means in practice is lower costs to the utilities, smaller bills for the consumer and a reduction in greenhouse gases per megawatt that will help cost-effective coal-fired generation achieve the EPA Clean Power limits.”

The North Carolina facility will enable the production of up to 480 GridBanks in the first year of production.

Since 2004 Alevo’s investment in the comany's combined research and development, together with the acquisition and fit-out of the manufacturing supply chain, represents a start-up investment of over $1 billion that has been met through private investments and equity funds.

Alevo