Quino Energy wins Tencent CarbonX grant for Maldives flow battery

Quino Energy, a Californian start-up developing water-based organic flow batteries, has been selected by Tencent's CarbonX programme to receive a grant funding the deployment of a megawatt-hour-scale battery system on Himandhoo Island in the Maldives. The project is the company's first commercial deployment of its quinone-based electrolyte chemistry and marks a notable early-stage validation moment for a class of long-duration energy storage that has struggled to move from laboratory to live grid.

The Himandhoo installation will integrate with a larger island microgrid combining floating photovoltaic generation, financed by the Asian Development Bank, and terrestrial PV and lithium-ion batteries being installed under the Maldives government's Preparing Outer Islands for Sustainable Energy Development (POISED) programme. The Quino battery's primary function is to displace expensive imported diesel, which currently underwrites electricity supply on many of the Maldives' 1,200-plus islands. Reducing that diesel dependency cuts both energy costs and carbon exposure for a nation whose entire economic existence is threatened by sea-level rise.

A multi-party supply chain spanning three continents

The project illustrates how cleantech deployments in frontier markets increasingly depend on globally distributed supply chains. Atri Energy Transition, which led Quino's Series A in October 2025, will manufacture the proprietary organic electrolyte in Pune, India, and provide operations and maintenance support on the island for at least five years post-commissioning. Flow battery hardware will come from Suqian Time Energy Storage, part of the Chinese group whose subsidiary Jena Flow Batteries has a joint development agreement with Quino. Grant funding originates from a Shenzhen-headquartered technology conglomerate. Execution spans California, India, China, and a South Asian island archipelago.

"This represents the first commercial deployment of the organic flow battery technology, in addition to government-supported projects we previously announced," said Eugene Beh, CEO and co-founder of Quino Energy. "The collaboration showcases how Quino's technology will continue to enable cooperation between parties from across the world to rapidly advance the next generation of flow batteries."

The CarbonX programme, now in its second phase, is Tencent's dedicated climate-tech funding vehicle targeting early-stage long-duration energy storage, carbon capture and carbon removal. The award ceremony took place in London alongside Climate Action Week, co-organised with TED Countdown, a pairing that signals how corporate climate capital is deliberately seeking public visibility alongside multilateral policy forums.

The wider capital and convergence picture

Quino's funding stack is a snapshot of the current long-duration energy storage (LDES) investment landscape. Beyond the Tencent grant, the company has drawn a $10m award from the California Energy Commission and $5m from the US Department of Energy's Critical Facility Energy Resilience programme, the latter earmarked for a 5 MWh flow battery deployment in Southern California. The blended public-private-corporate funding model reflects a broader reality: LDES technologies remain too early-stage and too capital-intensive for pure venture finance, so project economics are being engineered from multiple grant and equity sources simultaneously.

For cross-sector investors, the Maldives deployment is also a proxy for a larger infrastructure question. Small island developing states represent one of the most acute proving grounds for decentralised, resilient energy systems, and successful demonstrations there carry direct read-across to remote industrial sites, data centre campuses seeking grid independence, and defence logistics chains that still rely on diesel generation. If organic flow batteries can demonstrate bankable performance metrics in a high-humidity, extreme-weather environment with no local maintenance infrastructure, the addressable market expands well beyond climate aid. Corporate funders such as Tencent, operating climate programmes partly for reputational capital, are effectively subsidising the cost-reduction curve that would eventually make these systems viable for their own data centre energy resilience needs, a convergence that is rarely made explicit but is becoming structurally significant as hyperscalers come under greater pressure to decarbonise round-the-clock power consumption.