April 14, 2022: Italian energy tech start-up Energy Dome said on April 4 it had signed a deal to expand use of its ‘CO2 Battery’ technology in long-duration storage systems across Europe in partnership with Italy’s Ansaldo Energia.
Ansaldo will provide equipment, engineering, and construction for the “grid-scale energy storage projects” across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, the companies said.
Energy Dome’s first commercial CO2 Battery storage facility, which the company said uses a non-flammable, non-toxic carbon dioxide-based energy storage solution to store and dispatch power, is nearing completion in Sardinia, Italy.
The company said its technology “does not involve scarce and environmentally challenging raw materials like lithium”. Instead, it uses carbon dioxide and “off-the-shelf components to charge and discharge power from four to 24 hours, enabling renewables to serve as fully-dispatchable daily energy resources”.
According to Energy Dome, its technology uses CO2 in a closed-loop charge/discharge cycle as a storage agent. Before charging, gaseous CO2 is kept in a large dome structure.
During charging, electricity from the grid is used to compress the CO2 into liquid form, creating stored heat in the process. During discharge, the liquid CO2 is evaporated using the stored heat, expanded back into its gaseous form, and used to drive a turbine to generate electricity.
CO2 Batteries “can be deployed just about anywhere at less than half the cost of similar-sized lithium-ion battery storage facilities and have superior round-trip efficiency, with no performance degradation over a 25-year lifecycle”, Energy Dome said.
As many as 30 such facilities are anticipated to be built under the partnership with Ansaldo over the next five years.
Ansaldo CEO Giuseppe Marino said the agreement was “an important step in our plans to expand our clean energy business with energy storage solutions to help power industry players get the most out of their solar, wind, and other renewable energy resources, while ensuring reliability”.