Renewable energy sources are increasingly competitive, but require a growing need for storage capacity and power. Current storage technologies present problems in the availability of materials, as in the case of batteries, or also in finding suitable sites for installation, as in the case of hydroelectric pumping basins. But beyond that, there is also a cost problem. Even considering a progressive reduction in the costs of current storage technologies, there is an economic limit to the storage power that is convenient to install. The payback time would be too long, for example, for a system that stores energy only about ten hours a week. For this reason, energy scenarios forecast an increasing use of curtailment or the dissipation of excess energy produced from renewable sources.
Any transformation of electrical energy into another form that can be stored has the undesirable effect of generating heat. Turning electricity into heat is actually the simplest and cheapest process to store energy, with an efficiency of close to 100%. Marchetti PRO observed that storing energy at very high temperatures can be even cheaper than storing it at low temperatures, and moreover this energy is very versatile and can be used to power energy-intensive industrial processes that otherwise could be hardly decarbonized. Industrial demand for heat above 200°C corresponds to 15% of the world’s final uses of energy!
Moreover, Joule -Storage allows us to store and increase the temperature of waste heat from industry, facilitating its reuse in the same industrial process that generates the waste, minimizing energy losses also in batch production.
Joule Storage technology is based on the use of granular materials that are not subject to breakage, do not require maintenance and do not need industrial processing for production. Medium voltage electricity from the power grid simply passes through the granular material and heats it. Energy is recovered by means of a gas flow that laps the granular material, without the need for heat exchangers. This is why Joule Storage outclasses any other storage technology in terms of capital cost for power capacity, minimising the investment payback time. And this is also the reason because of we are convinced that curtailment will no longer be necessary and the industry will have renewable energy at a low cost.