Member Info for economist2023

From the guidance document “ It will also be a

world-leading skills and training centre which upskills students and workers, supporting business growth and addressing crucial skills gaps.”

That line reminds me of a post on X from Myles McNulty back in January who had been to the HyProMag opening event and had learned that “#MKA / HyP UK are establishing some sort of high-end recruitment / training center onsite at Tyseley”.

The UK gov has published guidance for the £20 million magnet hub grant scheme it is running: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6a43a2751a04d4dae8b814a6/magnet-hub-scheme-guidance.pdf

Reads to me as if it was written for HyProMag - not sure if there are any other credible bidders for this.

“ The Department for Business and Trade (DBT) is launching this grant competition as of the

government’s response to these challenges. It is designed to:

• accelerate the development of domestic capability in rare earth permanent magnet

manufacturing

• build on the UK’s existing strengths in midstream processing and recycling”

Just looking at the results again I see that the VFB projects had an assumed round trip efficiency of 69% while the VFB/Zinc projects had an assumed round trip efficiency of 62%. Assuming the VFB/Zinc projects were to be equally split, this implies a round trip efficiency for Eos Zinc batteries of only 55%. This is much lower than the up to 90% efficiency that Eos advertises on its website.

Eos batteries are known to have had issues with low RTE compared to Eos's claims - see the fuzzy panda research here: https://fuzzypandaresearch.com/eos-energy-eose-deadly-gas-doe-loan-default/

It therefore seems possible that the reported poor performance of operational Eos Energy batteries may have caused Ofgem to revise down their assumed RTE to only 55%, negatively impacting the Frontier bids. If this is the case, it is unfortunate for Invinity. I wonder if any other aspects of the poor historical performance of Eos batteries impacted the Frontier bids.

I imagine Frontier will be fighting the RTE point because Eos claims to have solved its RTE issues with the rollout of its DawnOS software platform that supposedly optimizes the performance of the batteries.

They clearly don’t care one bit about local content. We’ve seen that time and time again from successive governments refusing to give local content any advantage while other governments back their own industries. I had really hoped this mindset was changing given the noises the current government has been making, but seems this hope was naive.

I am busy working today so haven't had much time to digest the news, but I plan to review over the weekend the Ofgem decision to try and understand why lithium BESS was favoured. My initial read is that most of the BESS projects that won were around 16 hours duration while Invinity's projects and most of the unsuccessful lithium project were generally 8 hour duration projects. These winning BESS projects were mainly from developer Field - this developer seems to have understood better than other developers what Ofgem was looking for.

It is interesting that Frontier Power seems determined to fight for more of its projects to be included in the scheme. Presumably they do not agree with some aspect of Ofgem's assessment methodology. I haven't had time to review in detail but I do wonder about the validity of the 25 year asset life assumption for lithium BESS - my understanding was that these systems have to be replaced after 10 years.

In any case, while the cap and floor awards decision isn't the bonanza some of us (including me) were hoping for, a 260MWh win for Invinity is still excellent news, and I am still convinced there will be many more successful project wins for Invinity over the rest of this year and beyond. Good luck all.

No idea what they are aiming for, but I agree we will probably see more holdings updates. The update from today reported an increase in their holding by 1 million shares. There were 2 million in delayed trades from yesterday reported after hours today. It is of course very encouraging to see an insider buying more.

Thanks, PMC. From what I can see, there are countless letters of objection from local residents to any BESS system with thermal runaway risk...

Sorry, the last sentence was admittedly my own interpretation. I read in an article in an investment management journal back in summer 2025 after Artha Bharat had declared its initial stake, that it had a follow-on investment planned for later in the year, which turned out to be the investment it made through Next Gen Mobility and together with Atri. I have also seen the leadership of Artha Bharat and Atri liking each other's LinkedIn posts.

Artha Bharat Investment Managers is also a strategic investor. They have a minority stage in Next Gen Mobility which took part in the strategic fundraise in September last year and has the right to elect a board observer. Artha Bharat had already started accumulating its own stake before then, it started buying from around 10p in 2025. They are also friends with Atri.

I looked into this - the Vaca-Dixon BESS project page says it is planned to build a Lithium BESS system there. However, in 2024 Solano county initiated a moratorium on all BESS projects due to safety concerns, which ended in January this year. Since then, Solano county introduced a 300 foot setback requirement for BESS systems that pose a fire risk (as mentioned by John Hasar). So reading between the lines, it appears that Invinity is targeting this project on the basis that its batteries do not pose a fire risk and therefore don’t have to conform with these strict deployment requirements. The other angle is that the post seems to imply Invinity will set up manufacturing in Solano county. All very interesting

Huge. Thank you, CAT.

Https://invinity.com/invinity-first-nations-utility-batteries-partner/

Reads like a pretty strong new partnership in Canada gearing up for the expected BC Hydro capacity procurement. Not sure why no RNS, maybe we’ll get one later today. Invinity seemingly unstoppable at the moment.

There is an infographic at 1 minute into this video with some more info on the Atri investment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytHArJU4ch4

It says that the 300 million will be invested into battery storage, which in turn will drive expansion of manufacturing, generating over 1400 jobs. My interpretation is that Atri will invest in the cap and floor projects - Jonathan Marren has emphasized numerous times that enough cap and floor wins would enable Invinity to create over 1000 new manufacturing jobs. We will find out soon enough but its looking very good.

Perhaps Atri to be the Cerberus to our Eos (but hopefully less predatory). Seems this investment will surely be to support the cap and floor projects.

Excellent find fairlysolvent - this seems very significant, surely an RNS is due? Atri seems to have very deep pockets.

Interesting that the post was liked by Joe Mastrangelo of Eos Energy - I wonder whether they have also been summoned to London.

BD Director John Hasar posted the below on LinkedIn just now... it is music to my ears. Increasingly looks like Invinity may receive significant cap and floor project wins + government support to assist with their scale up.

"Exciting day in London starting the week with 3 meetings at Department for Business and Trade, Ofgem, and Department for Energy Security and Net Zero in Whitehall and Canary Wharf!

Opportunity to unpack Invinity's pathway to grow and scale-up in the United States and the United Kingdom. It was wonderful to make new connections and reconnect with friends as I was back in 3 Whitehall Place where I had my job interview at DECC 9 years ago!

Another great moment was to connect with Sam Harper in our London office to celebrate our 32 MWh contract with Pacific Steel Group in Mojave, California. It took us 85 days from first meeting to reach the finish line with signatures - a record for both companies!

At the end of the day, it was time to commute back to Essex from London Liverpool Street, this time without the Brompton!

Exciting times and grateful for everything!"

The results from this RFP were released today: https://ieso.ca/en/Sector-Participants/Resource-Acquisition-and-Contracts/Long-Term-2-RFP

There are three winners, Napanee BESS Phase 2 (300MW), NEOEN ONTARIO BESS 2 (190MW), and Simcoe Battery Project GP Inc (150MW). The documentation I can find for these projects indicate that they will all use lithium batteries but I will wait for the official updates from the project developers before ruling out Invinity.

Agree this pullback is crazy - wish I had some dry powder to top up.

Mkango filed an amended F4 earlier this evening https://www.sec.gov/edgar/browse/?CIK=2052373&owner=exclude

I took a look at a small sample of de-SPACs from earlier this year. The general pattern seems to be (i) filing public form F-4; (ii) a few weeks later filing amended F-4; (iii) around 2 days later it is declared effective, OR, another few weeks go by and another amended form F-4 is filed.

Therefore it is likely that the MKAR form F-4 is either declared effective this week, in which case the transaction should be completed at around the end of June/beginning of July, or Mkango will have to file another amendment, which would delay things another few weeks. Let's hope the wait is nearly over.