01.11.2022
Carbon dioxide batteries will save renewable energy
Photo from: Energy Dome
The Italian company Energy Dome has created and launched the first CO2 battery. It is an energy plant that uses carbon dioxide to store renewable energy.
This autumn, the company began a partnership with the Danish energy giant Ørsted, which is one of the world’s leaders in the offshore wind power segment and owns 25% of all the world’s offshore wind power plants.
The companies have signed a memorandum and will jointly conduct a feasibility study on building energy storage facilities with a capacity of 20 MW/200 MWh using CO2 storage. This will result in a 10-hour energy storage system for continental Europe in the second half of 2024.
The Energy Dome works on the principle of pneumatic energy storage systems, but uses carbon dioxide instead of compressed air. A special dome (there can be several of them) is filled with CO2. When the excess energy that needs to be stored enters the system, electric turbines compress the gas more and more tightly. The heat from the compression is withdrawn into a thermal energy storage system and the gas condenses into a liquid which is stored at ambient temperature under pressure. This is the charge cycle.
To discharge the battery and return the energy, the liquid CO2 evaporates using stored heat. Its expansion drives a second set of turbines, which generate electricity and feed it back into the grid.
Storing energy in such systems costs half as much as using lithium-ion batteries, the project’s authors claim. They first tested their development with a capacity of 2.5 MW and 4 MWh on the island of Sardinia.
Earlier this year, Energy Dome also signed a licensing agreement with major power plant supplier Ansaldo Energia to build energy storage facilities in Italy, Germany, the Middle East and Africa.
Cover photo: Energy Dome
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