Lu founded QPO out of Quailhurst Vineyard Estate in Sherwood in 2020, setting up a solar-panel field on land at the vineyard — where he also keeps an office — to generate electrical credits for his new company. He refers to the last three years as the company’s incubation period. He’s spent it setting up production schedules, meeting investors, hiring staff and overseeing construction of a 100,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Tualatin, which he estimates will begin production in 2024. Lu has also secured $8 million of equipment from Taiwanese holding company Yulon Group, which has a 49.5% stake in QPO. Lu also secured a letter of intent from Powin Energy, where he still sits on the board as chairman, to purchase 1.5 gigawatts’ worth of the company’s batteries. The company currently has 10 employees and six open positions. But when production starts in 2024, Lu estimates his factory could employ up to 400 people. QPO’s first line of battery modules will be for residential use and retail for approximately $10,000. The modules have the capacity to store a home’s generated solar power, act as a generator in case of a power outage and charge during off-peak energy hours in order to dispense power at more expensive times, meaning the modules would pay for themselves in time. The second product line will be battery modules to be placed into Powin Energy utility-scale products. Powin Energy’s 1.5-gigawatt letter of intent would translate into approximately 167,410 of these units. Lu says much of the lithium-ion battery manufacturing in the United States has been for electric vehicles — $73 billion was invested in domestic EV battery manufacturing last year, versus just under $900 million for residential batteries — but there is still opportunity in the residential market. “We have a lot of potential customers right now. Everybody’s looking for made-in-theU.S. products, but we’ll be the only ones!” Lu says, smiling. Virgil Beaston, QPO’s chief technology officer, was first recruited by Lu to join Powin in 2011 when the two met in China. Beaston pitched Lu on investing in his energy-storage company, and Lu countered with a job offer. Beaston left QPO six years ago to pursue his Ph.D. at Binghampton University in New York but dropped out early when Lu made him another offer — this time to be CTO of his new company. He says the opportunity to work with Lu again — and to be be a part of the economy’s transition to clean energy —was too exciting an opportunity to let slip. “He’s really good at business. I’m not good at business,” Beaston says. “I’m good at technology, and he’s got a 30-year track record, and the market for residential is coming very quickly. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the next two years, so it’s a chance to take everything we’ve learned and execute much better.” Beaston says as the economy consumes less and less carbon-based energy sources, the energy grid will need to provide significantly more electricity than it does currently. He says using batteries to store energy during off-peak hours and dispense it during peak hours is a more efficient alternative to making large-scale changes to the energy grid. “The biggest need for energy is in cities— high-density areas,” Beaston says. “They’re bringing in electric vehicles and they’re going to start using more and more electricity. I don’t believe there’s any way it will be cost- effective to increase the transmission grid by five, six, seven times. It will never happen. So energy storage is the only way it’s going to be solved. It’s like if you have four lanes going into Portland and it takes you two hours each way to go into the city with traffic. You can make it 15 lanes and solve the problem, but it’s such an overinvestment. Flex times are the better way to solve it. Energy storage avoids all those costs.” R osemary Coates is the executive director of the Reshoring Institute, a California-based nonprofit aimed at bringing manufacturing jobs to the U.S. from China. She says more and more companies are looking to reshore manufacturing operations because of fresh concerns over China’s perceived riskiness as a manufacturing hub. Coates spent 25 years as a management consultant working with firms wanting to offshore manufacturing to China, a job that eventually began to weigh on her. “During the 2012 election, Mitt Romney and Barack Obama were both China-bashing like crazy. It was all about China, and how our economic woes are all related to China and currency manipulation and human- Joseph Lu (left) and chief technolgy officer Virgil Beaston stand behind the battery modules that QPO will manufacture in Tualatin. 38
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