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The world needs a lot more energy, and it needs it quickly
the largest battery factories in the US. Earlier this year, we turned on Project Big Stone in South Dakota, which transformed from an empty lot into one of the world’ s largest battery storage projects in under one year.”
As electricity demand surges around the globe, it’ s no surprise that Antora is growing significantly.“ The world needs a lot more energy, and it needs it quickly,” Nehali states.“ One of the biggest things we need to change is how we think about energy in the first place. We tend to think of demand as static, because that’ s largely been the case to date. But if industries can flexibly adjust their consumption, it opens a world of possibilities. A great deal of the energy already on the grid goes unused, because it is generated when supply exceeds demand. Our batteries charge in exactly those hours, when electricity is cheap and abundant, and then deliver constant heat or power. That gets more out of the generation and wires we have already built and lets large new loads get online fast.”
Antora has designed the mechanism to be as simple as possible. Electricity heats blocks of solid carbon inside an insulated module; the blocks hold that heat and release it around the clock, either directly as process heat or through an off-the-shelf steam turbine that generates power for a data center or the grid. The choice of carbon is where the economics turn.“ Carbon is an exceptional energy storage medium,”
Nehali states.“ It’ s cheap( about a tenth the cost of lithium-ion materials), it’ s earth abundant, and it’ s available everywhere. It is also energydense, holding roughly four times the energy of a conventional battery in the same volume, which keeps the system compact and the costs low. And it does not wear out: the blocks can be charged and discharged without limit and do not lose capacity.”
Scale and speed
Turning to Project Big Stone, Nehali explains the project set out to provide affordable, reliable energy at the scale and speed the market needs.“ Project Big Stone is a five gigawatt-hour, multi-day thermal energy storage system at POET’ s bioprocessing facility in Big Stone City, South Dakota. It’ s delivering round-the-clock energy to POET, the world’ s largest producer of biofuels, under a long-term energy offtake agreement,” she adds.
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