It’s been a positive week for thermal energy storage technology, with utility Edison International validating a cold storage solution, a collaboration between two groups to achieve 100% round trip efficiency, and an acquisition involving several intellectual property rights patents.
The first awards of funding designed to “turbocharge” UK projects developing long-duration energy storage technologies have been made by the country’s government, with £6.7 million (US$9.11 million) pledged.
Thermal storage startup Antora Energy has raised US$50m from a group of investment firms including Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures to accelerate the development of its heat-based carbon block energy storage system for heavy industry.
An eight-hour duration lithium-ion battery project was recently selected as a long-duration energy storage resource by a group of energy suppliers in California. Girish Balachandran, CEO of Silicon Valley Clean Energy, tells us about the deal and what it signifies.
The EU’s European Investment Bank has pledged support for a long-duration thermal energy storage project and a gravity-based energy storage demonstration project.
A “novel and innovative” technology which uses CO2 as a medium to store energy could be made using off-the-shelf equipment and made available to the market as early as next year, the company behind it has said.
Approval is being sought for a 400MW advanced compressed air energy storage (A-CAES) project with eight hours of storage to be built in California by technology provider Hydrostor.
