Battery manufacturer Powin filed for bankruptcy on Wednesday. The Oregon-based company said it has more than $300 million in debt.
The Chapter 11 filing will let the company continue operating while it restructures its debt.
Powin manufactured grid-scale batteries using lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) cells from China. The company had been searching for alternative domestic suppliers, but the supply chain wasn’t sufficiently mature, Jeff Waters, the company’s former CEO, told Bloomberg in April.
The company laid off nearly 250 employees earlier this month, and just 85 remain, less than a fifth of what it started the year with. Alongside the bankruptcy filing, Waters was replaced by Brian Krane, Powin’s chief projects officer.
Powin was a survivor of the first clean tech boom over a decade ago. The company was taken private in 2018, and it received $135 million in growth equity in 2022 from investors, including Energy Impact Partners, GIC, and Trilantic Energy Partners. More recently, it secured a $200 million revolving credit facility from KKR.
In recent years, Powin has grown alongside the boom in grid-scale battery storage, ranked third in the U.S. in terms of installed capacity and fourth worldwide. The company did not say what spurred the sudden rise in debt, though given its reliance on Chinese LFP cells, tariffs may have played a roll.
