Energy Vault has developed the new energy storage system on the lines of gravity-based pumped hydro plants. The technology is set to combine conventional physics fundamentals of potential and kinetic energy with a proprietary, cloud-based software platform to operate a six-arm crane.
Operation of the crane is fully automated and the positioning of massive concrete bricks, offers the basis for an efficient storage and discharge of electricity. The use of low cost and environmentally-friendly waste debris concrete materials enables the system to achieve significantly lower cost per kilowatt-hour and high round trip efficiency while providing a 30-40 year life without any degradation in storage capacity.
Energy Vault claims that its energy storage system offers a 35MWh nominal energy capacity, with 4MW peak power and it can be modulated as per the requirement. It offers a millisecond response ramp time with 100% full power achieved in 2.9 seconds, supporting critical ancillary services.
The roundtrip efficiency is claimed to be 90%; zero storage degradation over time with no energy loss and more than 30-year lifetime with unlimited cycles. It also claimed to be nearly 50% lower in cost than the existing solutions on a capex $/kWh basis and nearly 80% lower when factoring in system life, operating, maintenance and replacement cost on a levelized cost of storage (LCOS) basis.
Energy Vault CEO and co-founder Robert Piconi said: “The world needs rapidly scalable and sustainable energy storage solutions to meet one of the most urgent challenges – the need to decarbonize our energy generation – and we’re thrilled to launch Energy Vault’s unique technology to help solve this problem.
“In addition to the vital environmental benefits that it provides, the system’s radical reduction in $kWh and overall levelized cost of storage enables our customers to provide dispatchable and baseload power cheaper than fossil fuels for the very first time.”
Furthermore, the company announced a technology and commercial partnership with CEMEX Research Group, a Swiss subsidiary of Mexico-based CEMEX.
The collaboration will focus on material applications which include the optimization of various concrete based composite materials that will support Energy Vault’s system deployments across the world.
