The power of tradition,
the energy of the future

After Carl Wolf invented a gasoline-powered miner's lamp, he teamed up with the businessman Heinrich Friemann to found the company that was to become GAZ. Soon, Friemann & Wolf, or FriWo, manufactured a range of different types of safety lamps, exporting their produce across the world.

FriWo’s first electric miner’s lamp equipped with a lead acid battery entered production in 1900, or possibly even a year earlier. In 1907, the first lamp with a Ni-Cd accumulator was added to the product range. A later design by the name Wolf's Alkali-lamp Nr. 950 was widely regarded as the best electric miner's lamp on the market. Around this time, FriWo started manufacturing other industrial lighting as well.

The variety of electric lighting appliances offered by FriWo steadily grew to encompass locomotive lamps, signaling lamps and similar equipment, all requiring a battery. Thus, the Deutsche Reichsbahn railway operator became a major purchaser of FriWo’s Ni-Cd accumulators, while its lead acid starter batteries were shipped across the town of Zwickau to the Horch automobile plant and its later offshoot, the Audi factory.

Following WWII, FriWo was divided into what found itself in the British and the Soviet occupation zones respectively. The Zwickau site was to be disbanded and shipped to Poland as part of reparations, however the Soviet military needed batteries for their vehicles and some machinery was allowed to stay. In 1952, the USSR returned the plant to the GDR, former FriWo now becoming a VEB, or a state-owned enterprise.

Now called GLZ, the plant was chosen to play a key role in the East German government’s plan to ramp up car production, supplying all the Trabants and Wartburgs with starter batteries. At this point, some 80 percent of the company’s production portfolio were car batteries, 10 percent Ni-Cd cells and 5 percent various lighting appliances, all of which GLZ exported across the whole Eastern Bloc.

After the wall between both Germanies was torn down and the GDR disintegrated, GLZ faced significant hardships as its eastbound supply chains were sewered while the East German automotive industry began falling apart as well. The enterprise was privatized by splitting it according to its main fields of production. The Ni-Cd manufacturing unit became what is GAZ today, keeping the historic buildings in Reichenbacher Straße.

In the 2000s, GAZ modernized its production facilities and introduced a whole new line of state-of-the-art Ni-Cd cells including the unique lomain range of batteries and later the SOL G range optimized for usage along with renewables. In 2005, GAZ became part of EnerSys, a leading provider of industrial energy storage solutions, and entered new markets such as aerospace or Oil and Gas.

Eventually, GAZ was acquired by Bochemie, a Czech electrochemical company which by that time has supplied GAZ with active materials for Ni-Cd cells for many years. In fact, Bochemie has been producing active materials since 1951 and whole electrode plates since 2002. Following the acquisition, a US subsidiary was established while GAZ started constructing another manufacturing site in Dammam, Saudi Arabia.

Together with Bochemie, GAZ entered a new realm of battery technology by introducing a whole line of industrial battery storage systems based on Li-ion cells. Available in pack, cabinet or container format, the units are sized from hundreds of kWh to several MWh. They offer exceptional manufacturing quality, a wide range of advanced safety systems, and come with proprietary software which makes the systems both highly efficient and impervious to cyber threats.

GAZ Energy was founded, pooling the battery and energy storage branch of Bochemie Group. At the same time, the company entered into a strategic partnership with Second Foundation, a major European energy service provider and one of the first users of GAZ ENERGY battery storage systems. Both steps allow GAZ ENERGY to focus resources more efficiently and to streamline business activities, drawing on a variety of synergies between all parties involved.