This edition of news in brief focuses on second life battery storage, a nuclear reactor-BESS partnership for data centres and flow batteries: energy storage technologies that are emerging or on the path to commercialisation.
Amazon invests in second life EV-to-BESS battery specialist Moment Energy
The Amazon Climate Pledge Fund has participated in a Series A funding round for second life battery storage company Moment Energy.
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Moment Energy, which repurposes electric vehicle (EV) battery packs for use in stationary battery energy storage system (BESS) applications, announced the successful close of the US$15 million funding round yesterday (16 January).
Headquartered in Vancouver, Canada, the startup manufactures a BESS solution available at scales from 400kWh to 10MWh capacity, targeted at commercial and industrial (C&I), EV charging and renewables integration market segments. The company received UL 1974 certification for its second life systems in 2023.
The company described this ‘intermediate’ market as a currently overlooked and underserved opportunity and plans to use the funding towards what it hopes will be the world’s first gigafactory-scale production plant for second life battery storage systems.
It would be built at a location in the US, and last October Moment Energy’s factory project was awarded US$20.3 million from the US Department of Energy (DOE). The project was one of 14 from small to medium businesses selected by the DOE to receive a share of US$428 million under the Biden-Harris administration’s Investing in America agenda, with all projects based in areas with decommissioned coal plants.
Moment Energy’s factory would have 1GWh annual production capacity. The company has raised US$52 million in funding to date. The Series A was led by Amazon’s climate technology investment division along with Voyager Ventures, another climate tech investor.
Moment Energy was among four second life battery storage companies interviewed and profiled for an Energy-Storage.news feature article in early 2023.
Energy Vault targets data centre market with small-scale nuclear company
Energy Vault has partnered with a small-scale nuclear reactor manufacturer to target data centres and other sites with high energy consumption.
Announced earlier this week (15 January), energy storage tech developer and system integrator Energy Vault has formed a strategic partnership with NuCube, a US startup aiming to develop nuclear reactors suitable for microgrid energy and high-temperature industrial heat applications.
It is early days for small modular reactors (SMRs), which are typically around 10MW and up to 300MW generation capacity. The only SMR known to be in commercial operation globally is in Russia which went online in 2020, although according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), more than 80 commercial designs are being developed for various applications.
Projects are under construction or in licensing in countries including Russia, China, Argentina, South Korea, the US and Canada, with designs targeting a variety of applications, the IAEA has said.
NuCube claims to have developed a reactor core module from scratch which it will combine with a proprietary power conversion system (PSC).
Energy Vault meanwhile came to prominence in the industry as a startup commercialising a novel gravity-based energy storage technology and has since diversified to add business lines into the more immediately addressable global market for lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery storage.
The two companies will look to integrate Energy Vault’s energy management system (EMS) and BESS solution B-Vault with NuCube’s NuSun platform, specifically designed for large energy use sites including data centres.
ESS Inc begins deliveries of utility-scale flow battery system
‘All-iron’ flow battery manufacturer ESS Tech Inc. (ESS Inc.) has delivered the first commercial orders of its new utility-scale Energy Center solution.
The Oregon, US-headquartered long-duration energy storage (LDES) company, which holds the IP for its iron and saltwater electrolyte flow battery systems, said yesterday (16 January) that Energy Center units have been delivered to an undisclosed ‘major Florida utility’ customer.
ESS Inc. claims that the Energy Center is scalable to megawatt-hour and gigawatt-hour scale applications, capable of discharge durations of 8-hours at full-rated power.
The unit is configurable to a range of power and energy capacities from 145kW DC upward and the company has previously said its flow batteries are well-suited for applications requiring up to about 14-hour duration.
Energy Center has a 25-year design life and as with other flow battery technologies is expected to be capable of unlimited duty cycling without experiencing degradation or capacity fade. ESS Inc.’s other main product, Energy Warehouse, is designed for commercial and industrial (C&I) and microgrid customers.
ESS Inc. and its fellow flow battery providers, which use electrolyte chemistries typically based on vanadium pentoxide, also claim their technologies are safer than lithium-ion as they do not feature battery cells that could go into thermal runaway and catch fire.
The company also announced that another utility, Portland General Electric (PGE) in Oregon, has finished the construction and initial testing of a 3MWh demonstration and test project.
Announced in 2022, the project is sited on land next to ESS Inc.’s factory in Wilsonville, OR, with PGE set to test the flow battery technology’s suitability for various applications, including frequency regulation, contingency reserve, voltage and VAR support and others. The project marked the first field deployment of Energy Center.
