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June 20, 2026 — Offgrid Energy Labs, an India-origin deep-tech energy storage company, has signed a memorandum of understanding with Keele University to test ZincGel, its patented long-duration storage chemistry, on the university campus in the UK. The batteries will be made at Offgrid’s new Hook, Hampshire facility and will be used in what the company says will be the UK’s first zinc-based long-duration storage project with batteries manufactured entirely in Britain.
The pilot will be staged at Keele’s Low Carbon Energy Generation Park. Using a fully islanded operating mode, the system will be asked to capture and store roughly 1 MWh of surplus renewable generation per month at the campus. In practical terms, the project is a stress test: engineers will track how the battery handles deep discharges, how much energy it returns, and whether it stays safe in day-to-day operation across changing seasons.
Keele already has a Low Carbon Energy Generation Park that includes two wind turbines and covers up to 50% of the campus’s electricity needs. That gives the project a real-world renewable profile instead of a synthetic test environment. Wind output on site can be high when demand is low, and dealing with that mismatch is the core job of long-duration storage.
The islanded configuration makes the test even more demanding. During the test window, the system will not be able to lean on the main grid to absorb errors. The campus microgrid will have to balance generation and load on its own. That is how utilities and commercial buyers prefer to validate new storage technology—not with a datasheet, but under operating conditions that actually punish mistakes.
ZincGel differs from most lithium-based storage systems in its fundamental materials. It relies on proprietary zinc-bromine chemistry and is designed to discharge continuously over a 6-to-16-hour window. That puts it in the long-duration category rather than the 2-to-4-hour window typical of lithium-ion plants.
The chemistry also avoids lithium, cobalt, nickel and rare-earth elements. Offgrid has positioned the product as a non-flammable storage platform, which is a meaningful advantage for installations near people, buildings or sensitive infrastructure. The company is targeting renewable integration, industrial energy resilience, microgrids and grid-scale storage.
The first phase will focus on the basics: safety, round-trip performance and deep-discharge capability. The location and seasonality of Keele’s wind generation also allow the team to observe how the battery behaves when renewable output swings from high to low and back again.
There is an operational goal as well. The project will explore how ZincGel can reduce renewable curtailment—the situation in which wind or solar assets are held back because the grid or local network cannot absorb the excess. If the pilot proves that zinc-bromine storage can shift that surplus into later hours, it would give renewables another way to stay connected instead of being switched off.
For American readers, the Keele trial is more than a UK campus project. It is an early real-world test of a non-lithium long-duration technology in a small, islandable microgrid—the kind of configuration that US universities, military bases, hospital districts and industrial parks are increasingly exploring.
The US federal government has also made long-duration storage a policy priority. The Department of Energy’s Long Duration Storage Shot has set a goal of cutting the cost of systems that can discharge for 10 hours or more by 90% by 2030. Technologies that operate in ZincGel’s 6-to-16-hour window are directly relevant to that target. A successful pilot at Keele could give US utilities a reference case when they evaluate multi-hour storage investments.
Supply-chain exposure is another point of interest. American project developers have grown more cautious about relying on lithium, cobalt and nickel imports. Because zinc and bromine are comparatively abundant and available from a wider set of suppliers, a viable zinc-bromine product could ease some of those concerns. Offgrid’s decision to open a UK manufacturing facility also shows that localization can be part of the plan, which tends to improve procurement confidence in older markets as well as new ones.
The near-term goal is deliberately small. But the roadmap is bigger. Based on results from this phase, the partners intend to develop a proposal for a larger multi-MWh ZincGel system at Keele. That follow-on system would be designed around the campus’s curtailment problem, storing renewable electricity that would otherwise be lost.
That scale-up path matters commercially. Long-duration storage has plenty of early-stage pilots around the world, but fewer projects that move from one megawatt-hour to several. A credible multi-MWh installation on a working campus would give Offgrid an asset it can point to in future procurement conversations, not only in Britain but across the United States and other markets.
Tejas Kusurkar, co-founder of Offgrid Energy Labs, described the MoU as a chance to take Indian deep-tech innovation into global markets. He pointed to the combination of India-origin technology, UK manufacturing and a live renewable energy environment as a promising way to demonstrate ZincGel’s real-world potential.
Raphael Hirschi, director of Keele’s Digital Society Institute, framed the pilot as a step toward solving renewable intermittency. He sees zinc-bromine batteries as a credible alternative to lithium-based storage for durations of up to a day, and the campus test will give that claim the kind of field data it has rarely received in the UK.
Zinc-bromine chemistry is not brand new. Researchers and flow-battery developers have studied it for decades. What has changed is market readiness: renewable buildout, grid congestion and greater demand for multi-hour flexibility have created a stronger reason for alternatives to lithium-ion.
The Keele project is part of that broader wave. Several countries are now running long-duration trials with non-lithium chemistries, and industrial buyers are paying closer attention to operational performance rather than marketing claims. If ZincGel holds up in an islanded setting with real wind data, seasonal swings and daily cycling, it will help move the entire zinc-bromine category forward.
An MoU is not the same as a construction contract, and there is still a long way from a 1 MWh-per-month pilot to a mature commercial product. But the specificity of this agreement—a named site, a specific battery chemistry, a manufacturing location and a clear plan for scaling—indicates a project that is likely to move beyond paper.
For anyone tracking long-duration storage, Keele is a useful site to watch. A pair of wind turbines, an India-founded company and a UK factory might seem like an unusual mix. In the fast-changing storage market, that combination is exactly the kind of real-world experiment that utilities want to see before they commit to a new chemistry.
