Tencent CarbonX backs Quino Energy's flow battery in the Maldives

Quino Energy, a San Leandro-based developer of water-based organic flow batteries, has been selected by Tencent's CarbonX programme for a grant to fund a MWh-scale battery system on Himandhoo Island in the Maldives. The award, accepted at a ceremony organised by TED Countdown during London Climate Action Week, marks the first commercial deployment of the company's quinone-based chemistry and pulls together capital and hardware from California, India, China, and a multilateral development bank.

The project is layered into a larger microgrid already taking shape on Himandhoo. Floating photovoltaic generation, financed by the Asian Development Bank, will sit alongside terrestrial PV and lithium-ion batteries being installed under the Maldives government's POISED (Preparing Outer Islands for Sustainable Energy Development) programme. Quino's flow battery adds a third storage layer designed to cut the island's dependence on imported diesel, which currently underpins electricity generation and represents a material cost burden for remote island communities facing both climate vulnerability and volatile fuel supply chains.

Technology and supply chain

The supply chain assembled for Himandhoo is a case study in the fragmented but increasingly internationalised ecosystem around long-duration energy storage. 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 for at least five years post-commissioning. Flow battery hardware comes from Suqian Time Energy Storage, a Chinese manufacturer whose parent company is also party to a Joint Development Agreement with Quino signed earlier this year. The arrangement underlines a broader pattern in the storage industry: chemistry IP increasingly resides in early-stage Western startups, while hardware manufacturing leverage sits with established Asian suppliers.

Quino CEO Eugene Beh noted that the project "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 Himandhoo deployment is positioned as proof-of-concept for a chemistry that the company says offers fire safety and local manufacturability advantages over lithium-ion at grid scale, claims that carry promotional weight, though the technology's Harvard University origins lend some academic credibility.

Cross-sector and capital landscape read-across

The convergence angle here is less about a single breakthrough than about a capital architecture that is becoming structurally significant. Tencent's CarbonX programme, now in its second phase, is channelling Big Tech balance-sheet capital into long-duration storage and carbon removal at the pilot stage, a funding tier that traditional climate-tech VC has historically found difficult to price. By occupying that early-commercial gap, CarbonX is doing what sovereign wealth funds have done in AI infrastructure: backstopping risk that commercial investors won't underwrite at the critical demonstration moment.

For cross-sector strategists, the Maldives deployment is also a data point in the emerging "island resilience" infrastructure market. Climate-exposed archipelago states, across the Indian Ocean, the Pacific, and the Caribbean, represent a concentrated demand pool for modular, non-lithium storage that can be locally maintained without a specialist cold chain. Multilateral development banks, including the Asian Development Bank, are already co-financing the surrounding infrastructure, creating a blended-finance template that other storage developers and their investors will be watching. Atri Energy Transition's S. Kishore described the CarbonX selection as "an endorsement of organic electrolyte chemistry," suggesting that grant programmes at this stage function less as pure philanthropy and more as de-risking signals for the next funding round.

Quino's recent momentum supports that reading. In the past 18 months the company has closed its Series A, secured a USD 10 million grant from the California Energy Commission, and received USD 5 million from the US Department of Energy's CiFER programme for a 5 MWh deployment in Southern California. The Himandhoo project adds an international commercial reference site to a domestic funding stack, exactly the combination that positions an early-stage storage company for a Series B conversation with infrastructure-focused capital.