Qatar Wealth Fund Invests $125 Million in Battery Firm Fluence

(Bloomberg) -- Fluence, a global battery storage joint venture of Siemens AG and AES Corp., said it reached an agreement with the sovereign wealth fund of Qatar for a $125 million investment.

The funding will give the Qatar Investment Authority a 12% stake in Fluence and values the battery company at more than $1 billion, the companies said Wednesday in a joint statement. Siemens and AES will retain a 44% stake each following completion of the deal, the companies said.

“This is one more milestone in our strategy of setting this company up and eventually taking it public,” AES Chief Executive Officer Andres Gluski said in an interview. The investment will allow Fluence to expand its energy storage offerings and develop its software that can maximize battery use in power markets, he said.

The global energy storage business is expected to boom in the coming decades as utilities will look to batteries to backstop an increasing amount of intermittent solar and wind power. BloombergNEF forecasts that the worldwide energy storage market could attract nearly $1 trillion in investments over the next three decades.

AES was an early entrant into the battery market, moving into the field more than a decade ago. Gluski said earlier this year that AES and Siemens were looking to sell a minority stake in Fluence, which has about 2.4 gigawatts of battery capacity installed or under development.

Fluence will have about $500 million in revenue this year and expects it to grow annually at 40% to reach $3 billion by the end of 2025, Gluski told investors in August.

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