Mitsubishi looks to secondary battery market

TOKYO, JAPAN - Last October, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Incorporated MHI began marketing a new forklift truck, the GRENDiA EX Hybrid, which is the world's first engine/battery hybrid forklift.

It features an on-board, secondary lithium-ion battery, which boosts fuel efficiency 39 higher than that of standard forklifts.

The lithium-ion battery was developed in-house by MHI, in association with Kyushu Electric Power Company Incorporated. The initial domestic marketing of the GRENDiA hybrid, along with MHI's desire to move into the secondary battery market, warranted the development of a lithium-ion battery pilot plant.

Around the same time GRENDiA's marketing began, MHI began construction on a lithium-ion battery pilot plant in Nagasaki, Japan, approximately 950 kilometers southwest of Tokyo, within the company's Nagasaki Shipyard & Machinery Works. The $56 million pilot plant, scheduled to be completed in two phases by next September, is expected to produce 400,000 medium-size, lithium-ion batteries per year. MHI is looking into the mass production of secondary batteries to be used in industrial machinery, wind power generation, and solar panel systems, and aims to produce 1.2 million cells annually.