Global attention is shifting towards renewable energy as a long-term means of addressing climate change. However, the intermittent nature of renewable energy sources is one of its main drawbacks. Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures recently made a ground-breaking investment in a firm that intends to transform energy storage to address this problem. This firm, Fourth Power, stores renewable energy for extended periods using liquid tin as a medium. We will examine the specifics of Fourth Power’s technology and how it might change the renewable energy market in this post.
Fourth Power announced on December 12 that it has secured $19 million in investment to facilitate the expansion of its technology. The company claims that its technology would yield better power density and be more cost-effective than lithium-ion (li-ion) batteries. The group said on Tuesday that their technology can assist in resolving problems related to the sporadic nature of electricity generation from renewable sources, such as wind and solar energy. According to the company, its thermal energy storage technology heats carbon blocks with renewable energy until they glow like the sun, and then it transfers the heat to the grid when electricity is needed.
The venture capital firm DCVC, which is situated in the San Francisco Bay Area and provides funding to high-tech startups, led the investment round. Other investors include the Black Venture Capital Consortium, which is an association of HBCUs, and Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV), which was established in 2015 by the late Bill Gates, the CEO of Microsoft.
The CEO of Fourth Power, Arvin Ganesan, told POWER that his company firmly feels that any new technology must improve the grid’s dependability, efficiency, and affordability. Our ability to “grow with the grid” is made possible by the way our technology is built. We can satisfy today’s needs and expand modularly into tomorrow’s, as opposed to constructing massive batteries that don’t immediately benefit ratepayers and grid operators. What sets us apart from other battery technology is that basic approach, which is based on the technology we have been working on over the previous ten years.
Fourth Power said that because its system uses easily accessible and reasonably priced materials, it is less expensive than existing energy storage systems. allowing for ten times less expensive energy storage than lithium-ion batteries. According to Ganesan, his company uses materials with an easy supply chain to build their batteries. We can scale by avoiding the requirement to obtain minerals such as lithium.
Technology of the Fourth Power
Asegun Henry, Ph., created the technology behind Fourth Power while he was a professor at Atlanta’s Georgia Tech. Currently, Henry attends MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The business claimed that its thermal battery technology was the world record holder for the greatest temperature pumping of liquid metal, with a temperature of 1,200°C.
According to Fourth Power, its energy storage device transforms thermal energy from renewable sources like solar or wind power and stores it for later use. Liquid tin is heated by the thermal battery and then transported through a pipe system to heat carbon block stacks until they glow brightly. After that, the device uses thermophotovoltaic (TPV) cells to absorb light and turn it into electrical energy. According to the business, their technology offers grid operators the most control and flexibility at the lowest cost when compared to alternative energy storage technologies, while also optimizing the value of renewable energy generation. Furthermore, when renewable output rises, the system may grow with the grid thanks to its modular and scalable design, which allows for the addition of additional carbon blocks to extend storage.
Co-founder and managing partner at DCVC Zachary Bogue stated that Fourth’s Power’s offering is an engineering sun-in-a-box. We are ecstatic to collaborate with this outstanding group, whose state-of-the-art technology has the potential to significantly boost renewable energy production and consumption.
According to the business, utility-scale energy storage is approached with the anticipated rise in solar and wind power output in mind. It claimed that, while retaining the lowest possible cost, renewable energy that would otherwise be squandered owing to curtailment could be held for more than a month and released over any duration, from a few hours to a few days. The technology was reported to be able to “meet today’s short-duration [5-hour] needs and the longer-duration [100-hour] needs of the future.” Its ability to discharge in a matter of seconds makes it distinctive and useful to grid operators in their efforts to guarantee a dependable grid and continuous power supply.
Reliable and scalable clean energy storage will be essential to achieving a zero-carbon future, according to Carmichael Roberts, co-chair of BEV’s investment committee. Roberts is a managing partner and co-founder of Material Impact, a venture fund that invests in technology startups creating goods with cutting-edge materials.
According to Roberts, Fourth Power is well-positioned to accelerate the development of its cutting-edge storage solutions and hit major milestones in the upcoming years thanks to its years of research and technological advancements.