From the Forwarding Frontlines to Energy Storage Specialist

By Luke King

A former forwarder turned shipper, Fluence’s Lorena Alvarez leads a team of project professionals tasked with tackling some of the most complex logistics challenges. Find out what happens when a seasoned service provider takes the reins on the shipping side.

From Issue 4, 2025 of Breakbulk Magazine

(5-minute read)

Few logistics teams can be as well-equipped as the one led by Lorena Alvarez, senior logistics operations manager for the Americas at Fluence, a global leader in battery energy storage systems. Her entire group, she says, is composed of former freight forwarders — a strategic advantage in a complex, high-pressure supply chain where experience can make or break a project’s success.

“We know all the tricks,” she jokes, “but that works both ways. It allows us to catch different things that may be coming our way, but it also allows us to work better with the freight forwarders and the different carriers, understanding the scope of their work and not expecting them to do something that is just not possible.”

Born in Nicaragua, Alvarez moved to the U.S. as a newlywed and soon found herself drawn into logistics. She started out at a family-owned forwarding firm in Florida, which opened the door to a career spanning more than two decades with some of the industry’s biggest names, including Panalpina, DHL, Kuehne + Nagel, Rhenus Project Logistics and Fracht.

“I studied international relations and I wanted to be a diplomat, which didn’t work out,” she says. “I have family members who had a small forwarding company in the Miami area and so when we moved to the U.S., I started working with them.

“I loved the idea that I was able to work with people all around the world – that satisfied my diplomat desires of wanting to interact with different cultures and different people. It was all very interesting and you know, I was sucked in. That’s what happens in logistics – you just never leave.”

High-Stress Sector

Despite having made the move to a shipper role, Houston-based Alvarez says she continues to hold the freight forwarding profession in high regard. “I give a lot of credit to the forwarding side, the stress is huge. You’re the one that has to make everything come to fruition no matter what.

“I’m somebody that is very committed to accomplishing a mission. I think you have to be strong enough to uphold your values and the commitments you’ve made to your customer because, at the end of the day, people don’t even remember where I’ve been, where I’ve worked – but they do remember working with me.”

Demonstrating the importance of personal connections in the project cargo sector, Alvarez reveals she left forwarding in January 2022 in order to join her friend and mentor Agustin Harriague, who was then director of logistics at Fluence (and is now employed at Mitsubishi Power Americas).

“I’ll be very honest, I always wanted to work with Agustin,” she said. “I enjoyed working with him when I was at Fracht and he was my customer at Siemens Energy.

“He’s tough, but he’s been a huge mentor, even though he’s younger than me. He taught me so much and I wanted to continue the experience that I had with him, as he was able to impact the way I saw things and really bring another level of excellence to the projects we were working on.

“Going to the shipper’s side was not necessarily in my purview, in fact I wondered if it might be boring. I was used to solving problems all day long, that’s what you do in forwarding. Well, it turns out that Fluence has a plethora of internal customers – and there has never been a boring day!”

Logistics Challenges

Today, Alvarez helps manage the safe, timely, and often delicate transportation of Fluence’s energy storage systems — including lithium-ion battery enclosures and supporting components — to project sites across the Americas.

In her current role, the toughest logistics challenges aren’t necessarily about size or weight — more often, they involve the sensitivity of the cargo, and the remoteness of customer sites. Chief among the complexities is the material at the core of energy storage: lithium-ion batteries.

“In the U.S., there’s no federal guidance around the transportation and storage of lithium-ion batteries” she said. “So we take it upon ourselves to do hazmat consulting, make sure that we have contingency plans for battery storage and so on, to reassure not only the warehouses and our logistics partners, but also our insurance companies.”

This regulatory ambiguity has created uncertainty across the supply chain. “Steamship lines are sometimes nervous about it, we understand that. They may not want to take large amounts of batteries on their vessels and we have to work around that.

“It’s a matter of working with all of our providers and sort of splitting the pie so we can keep things moving. You’ll see us charter vessels sometimes. Ultimately, I think there needs to be more education around lithium-ion batteries because the lack of guidance does sometimes create uneasiness for the people handling it.”

The complexity of Fluence’s deliveries varies widely, but some are particularly demanding, such as a recent job in the Chilean mountains that tested Alvarez’s team. “We work in locations where these heavy enclosures are hard to deliver,” she said. “There are sites that are mountainous, and you may have different roadblocks that prevent smooth transportation.

“We face numerous obstacles. Even though we’re not moving a huge turbine or generator or whatever, our units still require a lot of planning, a lot of surveying, making sure we can go on the roads we need to. In many places in Latin America – even here in the U.S., in fact – we aren’t always working with fully-developed roads.

“If I may say so myself, I do think that the logistics teams we have at Fluence are very robust, having come from the forwarding industry. Our customers can rest easy knowing that we’re going to deliver their product and that we’re going to find the best possible way.”

Incentives Drive Local Content

Fluence, an early pioneer in grid-scale storage, now finds itself in an increasingly competitive landscape, along with evolving policy frameworks designed to promote domestic content. It recently hosted U.S. Senator John Curtis (R-UT) to its Utah facility that produces battery modules, and says its investment in U.S.-based manufacturing has been “accelerated” by the availability of federal tax credits.

Accordingly, the company is ramping up domestic manufacturing facilities in Arizona, Texas, Tennessee, and Utah, which supply cells, modules, enclosures, thermal management systems and battery management systems.

And while manufacturing in Asia remains important for non-U.S. markets, the trend is clear. “A lot of it will come to the States,” Alvarez said.

“This didn’t just start recently,” she said. “This has been going on since before I started. By early 2022, we had already identified a location for the first contract manufacturing facility in the U.S.”

What has changed in recent months is U.S. trade policy, particularly as it relates to tariffs. “I think these times call for a more strategic procurement effort and creative shipping solutions,” says Alvarez. “It’s not so different from COVID, really.

“Thankfully, right now we’re in a pause and so it’s a matter of making sure that we take advantage of that tariff pause as much as we can. Our focus on domestic content has helped us tremendously, because we have a lot being built here in the Americas now. That has definitely been a positive for us.”

Looking ahead, Alvarez says she is particularly excited about SmartStack, a new energy storage system launched by Fluence in February 2025. Designed for large-scale power projects, SmartStack is a high-density, factory-built battery unit that can store more energy in a smaller footprint - up to 7.5 megawatt-hours per enclosure.

The system aims to make grid battery installations faster, easier, and cheaper by simplifying transport, setup, and maintenance. “This is significant because it’s going to change the way that we’re shipping this enclosure,” said Alvarez.

“We’re used to shipping an enclosure as a whole, and now it’s going to be modular so we’ll be able to ship it in pieces, which is amazing. It will make it easier and faster to ship, but of course there will still be customer locations that are hard to get into, so that level of planning won’t go away.”

As our interview draws to a close, I ask Alvarez about her experience navigating a male-dominated industry, and she doesn’t hesitate to offer some parting advice to women in logistics.

“I come from a place where it was very sexist, my father was a very sexist person. When I told him I was going to play soccer, he said: ‘Absolutely not. That is a man’s sport!’ So what did I do? I started playing soccer, of course.

“He never came to watch me play, but I did it anyway. So, if you want to accomplish something, you do it, regardless of who’s telling you otherwise. What I learned from my childhood was to be strong, do the right thing – and say your piece.”

Fluence is a member of the Breakbulk Global Shipper Network. The next in-person meet-up for BGSN members will be at Breakbulk Americas 2025 on 30 Sep - 2 Oct in Houston.