CASE STUDY
Allegro Energy wins Good Design Gold Award - being recognised as APAC's best engineering design and best product design (commercial and industrial)
Allegro Energy’s world-first Microemulsion Flow Battery addresses the need for safe, scalable, and sustainable long-duration energy storage (LDES).
The remarkable innovation was recognised at the 2025 Australian Good Design Awards with a Good Design Gold Award. The Gold Award is a distinction reserved for the most outstanding project in each category.
Representing the top scoring projects in each category, they surpassed the criteria for good design, demonstrating innovation and positive impact in their field; embodying what it means to set a new standard in design excellence. To be recognised with a Gold Award is to join an elite group whose work makes a lasting mark on industry, community and culture.
The company
Allegro Energy is a pioneering energy company developing long duration energy storage solutions to build a future powered by plentiful cheap and clean renewable energy storage.
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Allegro Energy’s world-first Microemulsion Flow Battery addresses the need for safe, scalable, and sustainable long duration energy storage (LDES). Featuring proprietary, innovative water-based microemulsion electrolytes, it prioritises cost-efficiency, environmental safety, and modular scalability, offering an alternative to current lithium-ion technology and enhancing support and adoption for renewable energy systems.
The challenge
The energy market faces a gap in long-duration storage, with lithium-ion technologies becoming inefficient beyond four hours.
These systems are costly, have increased flammability risks, and are difficult to recycle, raising long term sustainability concerns.
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Allegro Energy set out to solve these challenges by designing and commercialising a scalable, configurable flow battery powered by its proprietary microemulsion electrolyte. This innovation enables safe, cost-effective, and environmentally responsible long-duration energy storage. By overcoming the key limitations of existing technologies, their solution supports broader renewable energy adoption through improved performance, reduced costs, and a fundamentally more sustainable approach to grid-scale energy storage.
The solution
Allegro Energy and The Melt collaborated to develop a design solution for the challenges presented.
The Melt’s Principal Industrial Designer, John Klinkenberg invested the time in understanding the user and design requirements to develop a ground up design for the LDES solution.
After careful collaboration and testing, they came up with a design for the Microemulsion Flow Battery – a world first.
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To commercialise and implement this chemistry into a LDES solution, it required the design of a battery known as a Microemulsion Flow Battery. As this was not commercially available it would require a ground up design. Key to this were considerations for scalability, configurability, modularity and a focus on Design for Manufacture & Assembly (DFMA).
With many of the battery components produced locally to the local Hunter region of NSW, another aim was to build long lasting and invaluable manufacturing partnerships. In turn, growing and advancing not only the energy sector but sovereign manufacturing as a value add to the community and ultimately, the nation.
The results
The Microemulsion Flow Battery is a gamechanger for the long duration energy landscape offering a safe, scalable and environmentally friendly solution that will help Australia achieve the required 16-fold increase in storage by 2050, and help global energy generators to achieve net zero.
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The Allegro Energy microemulsion flow battery has a significant impact on clean energy storage by offering a safe, scalable, and environmentally friendly alternative to lithium-ion systems.
It also fills the gap that is seen in current energy storage solutions by offering a true long energy storage solution that surpasses current market offerings.
Allegro Energy’s water-based electrolytes reduce fire risk and environmental harm, while lower base material costs make long-duration energy storage more affordable. The scalable, configurable, and modular design enables flexible deployment across a range of applications, from community microgrids to large-scale renewable integration.
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