TURTLE CREEK, Pennsylvania — When Joe Mastrangelo joined the fledgling Eos Energy Storage in 2018 in Western Pennsylvania’s Mon Valley, he said the plan was to build the batteries in China and ship them back to the United States.
“That quickly changed to us moving all of the manufacturing back to the United States because it would be easier for us to scale up production. We ended up building a whole supply base to the point where 90% of the product made here comes from the United States,” he said.
Mastrangelo is standing in the middle of one of the buildings in the massive 92-acre manufacturing site along Braddock Avenue. For nearly 100 years, the building was occupied by the men and women who worked at the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company.
What was built here supported the power generation industry for a century before it moved its operations to Charlotte, North Carolina, in the 1980s. It was the site of the genius of Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla, who Westinghouse convinced to come here because of the brilliant Serbian’s invention of an induction motor that worked with the kind of alternating current Westinghouse was championing for America.
Today, safe, efficient, and sustainable zinc-based, long-duration energy storage systems are built here. It is equally innovative in energy manufacturing — it produces Eos Z3TM batteries at scale. And they are made using materials from America.
The manufacturing line in the building is humming — not just from machinery but also from people and robots working together to serve the growing long-duration energy storage demand.Â
The workers range from members of the United Steelworkers union to CMU and MIT graduates. They work on the technology and engineering required to make this non-lithium battery scalable to serve industry, the U.S. military, and more.
They stand in the same place where, one hundred years ago, workers toiled over making semiconductors. Those workers lived on the hill overlooking the plant and attended Mass at one of several parishes blocks from the plant.
Mastrangelo said their customers are utilities, utility-scale power developers, and small micro-commercial industries. What differentiates them from other technologies is what their batteries can do.Â
“So, if you think of any product that has any kind of lithium,” he explained, “if you don’t charge for a while, it doesn’t work. Our battery just keeps running and doesn’t degrade. It’s fully recyclable, nonflammable, and there are no toxic materials.”
In short, it is not going to blow up in the way a lithium battery will. That’s because there is no “thermal runaway.” The chain reaction that happens with those batteries when there is an escalated increase in temperature could cause a catastrophic failure.
“We don’t have the fire risk of other technologies. We also put more containers closer together than other technologies,” Mastrangelo said.
Lithium batteries are the primary power source for electric cars and trucks. They are also used to store excess energy generated by renewable sources such as solar panels and to power medical devices, electric bikes, scooters, hoverboards, and drones.
They are primarily made in China, which is at the global forefront of the EV battery industry. China’s firms produce nearly two-thirds of the world’s EVs and more than three-quarters of EV batteries, according to the Information and Technology Foundation.
Mastrangelo explained that his company flies under the radar because of the conservative nature of the energy industry, especially as it relates to the rollout of new technologies.
“I’ve been with the company almost seven years, and we’ve spent most of the time improving the technology we’ve developed,” he said.
It’s not much different from what Westinghouse and Tesla did here 100 years ago.
“We are now operating out in the field. We have 34,000 discharge cycles out there, and we’ve done 3 million cycles in our test facility in New Jersey. So now that the technology is proven, if a big project needs us, we are ready to produce,” he said.
The majority of what they have done since their rollout last year is in the U.S. “That is where the demand is,” Mastrangelo said.
In fact, the demand is so high that the little company no one knows about is about to expand — it is looking at other former industrial facilities in the Mon Valley in towns like Charleroi and Duquesne.
Everyone working here, union or not, gets a share of stock in the company as part of their salary. Right now, that value is equal to the yearly salaries of some. It’s a much-needed infusion of cash and vitality. The communities in the valley have seen nothing but job losses due to bad trade deals and unfair tariffs that have affected manufacturing for several decades.
The blue-collar worker here is not required to have finished high school, Mastrangelo said. “The only requirement here is a willingness to work. … We do a lot of on-the-job training. The way it works is you start off in the warehouse, and you work your way up onto the equipment.”
James Howe is standing on the shop floor overlooking the equipment. His job is to make sure the batteries come out of the series of checkpoints in order. “I then feed the good parts back into the machine.”
Howe, 32, is well over 6 feet tall, with shoulder-length dreadlocks. He has a broad smile as he inspects the batteries coming down the line. “I am a member of the steelworkers, and I love my job. I love what I do.”
Mastrangelo walks over to the former headquarters of Westinghouse, which is adjacent to Eos’s operations. The distinctive red-orange brick of the building still gleams in the sun. So do the ornate gargoyles that adorn each doorway into the building. The 18 dormer peaks that gave the building its majestic castle-like look haven’t crumbled — but the windows are now all boarded up.
Inside is a ghostly presence of something that once was and is now gone.
The entire building is shockingly hollowed out, a shell of what was the place where Westinghouse and Tesla discovered the way to illuminate the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago — and then, two years later, built the first hydroelectric power plant in Niagara Falls, which, in turn, started the electrification of the world.
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At its peak, the Westinghouse Electric plant on Braddock Avenue, straddling the towns of Turtle Creek and East Pittsburgh, employed as many as 20,000 people and played a significant role in power generation for a century and building the communities around it.
Mastrangelo said Eos strives to be an innovator powered by American products and American workers. He just needs more people to know what they’ve started here.