A revolutionary new CO2 battery backed by a Bill Gates fund has won its first contract in the US with utility Alliant Energy.
Developer Energy Dome said this is a landmark deal for the company and a “major step forward” for the long-duration energy storage sector generally.
The Columbia Energy Storage Project will see Energy Dome build a 20MW/200MWh energy storage facility that it says can power around 18,000 homes in Wisconsin for 10 hours on a single charge.
“Our forward-thinking collaboration with Alliant Energy is not just about innovation,” said Energy Dome CEO Claudio Spadacini. “It's about creating opportunities for imminent scaled deployment in the US energy sector.”
“Our technology is poised to play a transformational role in how energy is stored and managed,” he said.
Italian start-up Energy Dome has developed a thermodynamic liquid-CO2 system to store excess green energy from wind and solar farms.
The system sees CO2 compressed until the gas is heated up to 300°C liquid. Heat is then extracted and stored in “bricks” made of steel shot and quartzite for later use, cooling down the CO2 to an ambient temperature. The gas is then condensed into liquid form and stored in carbon-steel tanks.
When power is needed, the liquid CO2 is run through an evaporator to turn it back to a pressurised gas. This is re-heated before going through an expansion turbine, where it rapidly expands at atmospheric pressure to drive a power-generating rotor.
The uncompressed CO2 is then stored in a flexible dome — hence the company name — at ambient temperature and pressure for later re-use.
Breakthrough Energy Catalyst – set up by Microsoft billionaire Gates to back promising energy technologies – last December
pledged up to €35m ($38m) for a “first-of-a-kind” project Energy Dome is building on the Italian island of Sardinia, with the EU also lending its support.
In its latest announcement, Energy Dome said that the Sardinia project is “proceeding at full speed” and expected to be completed early next year.
Due to the modular and standardised approach, Energy Dome said that the Italian plant will “virtually be identical” to the one made in the US.
Raja Sundararajan, executive vice president of Alliant Energy, said he believes this will be the “first of many” CO2 batteries that the partnership with Energy Dome will yield.
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