Towering renewable storage tech reaches commercialisation

Energy Vault says its gravity-based solution can help provide rapid demand response in an affordable way

A renewable technology firm has announced the commercial availability of its gravity storage solution.

Energy Vault’s storage device uses excess energy to winch massive concrete bricks to the top of a tower, where they can be quickly lowered when energy is needed, turning a spool and generating electricity.

The firm says the technology can produce 4MW of peak power, provide full power response in 2.9 seconds and achieve a round-trip efficiency of 90% – the nature of the equipment means it suffers from zero-degradation over time with no energy loss.

The firm uses a cloud-based software platform to operate a fully automated six-arm crane.

It has also announced an agreement with the Tata Power Company to deploy an initial 35MWh Energy Vault system, with deployment expected in 2019.

Robert Piconi, CEO and Co-Founder of Energy Vault, said: “The world needs rapidly scalable and sustainable energy storage solutions to meet one of the most urgent challenges – the need to decarbonise our energy generation – and we’re thrilled to launch Energy Vault’s unique technology to help solve this problem.”

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