Imagine a moving tower made from huge cement bricks weighing 35 metric tons. The motion of these enormous blocks is powered by solar or wind energy plants and is a means to store the energy these plants generate. Software controls the motion of the blocks automatically, responding to changes in power availability across an electrical grid to control and release the power which ’s being created.
The evolution of this technology will be the culmination of years of work in Idealab, that the Pasadena, Calif.-based startup incubator, and Energy Vault, the business it phased out to commercialize the technologies, has just increased $110 million in SoftBank Vision Fund to take its next steps on earth.
Energy storage remains one of the largest barriers to the large scale rollout of renewable energy technology to utility grids, however utilities, development agencies and private businesses are investing billions to deliver new energy storage capacities to market as the technologies to store energy improves.
The expense in Energy Vault is just 1 indicator of this large market that investors see coming as power companies spend billions on renewables and storage. As The Wall Street Journal reported on the weekend, ScottishPower, the U.K.-based utility, is committing to spending $7.2 billion on renewable energy, grid upgrades and storage technology between 2018 and 2022.
Meanwhile, from the wilds of Utah, the American subsidiary of Japan’s Mitsubishi Hitachi Power Systems is operating on a joint venture that would make the planet ’s largest clean energy storage facility. That 1 gigawatt storage would go a very long way toward providing renewable power to the Western U.S. energy grid and is going to be based on compressed air energy storage, including large flow batteries, solid oxide fuel cells and renewable hydrogen storage.
“For 20 years, we’ve been significantly reducing carbon emissions of their U.S. energy grid utilizing natural gas together with renewable energy power to replace retiring coal-fired energy production. In California and other states in the western United States, that will have retired their coal-fired energy production, we need the next step into decarbonization. Mixing natural gas and storage, and using 100% renewable storage, is the next thing,” stated Paul Browning, president and CEO of MHPS Americas.
Energy Vault’s technologies might also be used in these kinds of remote places, based on chief executive Robert Piconi.
Energy Vault’s storage technologies surely isn’will be omnipresent in highly populated regions, however the firm ’s towers of blocks can operate nicely in remote places and have a lower cost than chemical storage alternatives, Piconi said.
“What you’re viewing there on some of the battery is that the requirement in the marketplace for a mobile solution that isn’t connected into topography,” Piconi said. “We clearly aren’t even putting these systems in metropolitan areas or the middle of cities. ”
For places that want larger-scale storage which ’s a bit more flexible you will find storage alternatives for example Tesla’s new Megapack.
Tesla has a fresh energy product Named Megapack
The Megapack comes completely assembled — including battery modules, including bi-directional inverters, a thermal management system, an AC breaker and also controllers — and can store up to 3 megawatt-hours of energy with a 1.5 megawatt disk capacity.
Even the Energy Vault storage process is created for more, much bigger storage capacity. Every tower can store between 20 and 80 megawatt hours in a cost of 6 cents per kilowatt hour (on a levelized cost basis), based on Piconi.
The first facility that Energy Vault is developing would be a 35 megawatt-hour platform in Northern Italy, and there are other undisclosed contracts with millions of customers on four continents, according to the provider.
One location where Piconi sees specific applicability for Energy Vault’s tech is about desalination plants in places like sub-Saharan Africa or desert areas.
Backing Energy Vault’s brand newest storage technologies are a clutch of shareholders, including Neotribe Ventures, Cemex Ventures, Idealab and SoftBank.
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