Tag: Energy Dome

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Energy Dome gets $44M uplift into its CO2 battery for renewable energy storage

Italian climate startup Energy Dome, which has developed a “CO2 Battery” for storing renewable energy, has closed a €40 million (~$44M) Series B round — bringing the total raised for its novel energy storage solution to €54M (or just shy of $60M).

The round was co-led by Eni Next, the corporate VC arm of Italian energy giant Eni; along with Neva SGR, the VC company owned by European banking group Intesa Sanpaolo. Existing investors also participated, including Barclays’ Sustainable Impact Capital, CDP Venture Capital, Invitalia, Novum Capital Partners and 360 Capital. Other investors in the round include Japan Energy Fund and Elemental Excelerator.

We last covered the 2020-founded startup when it closed an $11M Series A back in 2021 — explaining that its system uses CO2 in a closed-loop cycle to store energy generated from renewable sources (such as solar).

Storage is important for renewables as major clean sources of energy generation like solar and wind power are variable, since the sun doesn’t always shine nor the wind always blow. This means, not that renewables are useless (as some right-wing politicians have tried to claim) but that decarbonizing the electricity grid using these alternative (green) sources of power requires innovation in storage tech — which is where Energy Dome is aiming to step in with its CO2 Battery.

Its system works by changing the chemical compound, CO2, from gas to liquid and back to gas (via compression and/or evaporation) in order to generate heat — which is either stored or used to drive a generator depending on whether the system is in charging or discharging mode.

The startup is named for an inflatable atmospheric gas holder filled with CO2 (when in its gaseous form) which forms a core component of the storage system. Other key ‘ingredients’ for its battery are steel and water and Energy Dome touts the robustness of the system as a major differentiator vs alternative storage solutions, claiming no degradation over 30 years of operation.

It also claims the CO2 Battery can store renewable energy with “75% RTE (AC-AC, MV-MV)” — meaning that for each unit of renewable energy stored the system is able to return 75% for later usage — doing so at a cost that it says is half the price of lithium batteries. (And mining for lithium raises environmental concerns in and of itself.)

Back in 2021 the startup was aiming to use the Series A funds to commercialize the tech. It’s made some progress on this front — saying it’s working with “several” utilities, independent power producers and corporate customers in key markets at this stage, per a press release, touting what it describes as “a qualified pipeline that exceeds 9GWh” in markets such as the U.S., Europe, South America, India and Australia.

The Series B funds will be used to enter what Energy Dome dubs “full commercial scaling mode on a global basis” — although it says it’s focusing on a set of key markets, with the US being principal among them (with an eye on tax incentives for green energy). 

“Our CO2 Battery is ready for the market and, after closing the Series B round, we are ready to guarantee its performance to any customer that is real about getting rid of fossil fuels and substituting with dispatchable renewable energies,” noted founder and CEO Claudio Spadacini in a statement.

The startup added that it expects to have two standard 20MW-200MWh frames commercially operational by the end of 2024 — noting that the first unit already in the process of being manufactured.

Its focus now is on keeping up early momentum, having gone from starting operations to commercial-scale deployment in just three years, it also said. 

“The use of proceeds of the round will serve to provide financial guarantees to customers as a demonstration that this team is ready to put their ‘skin in the game’ alongside their customers in deploying the CO2 Battery,” it added. “The investment will also support Energy Dome’s business expansion in the U.S. in order to leverage at maximum from the opportunities deriving from the Inflation Reduction Act and the associated Investment Tax Credits available for utility-scale energy storage.”

Energy Dome uses CO2 for long-term power storage for renewable energy

Winners, losers abound as Inflation Reduction Act becomes law

Energy Dome gets $44M uplift into its CO2 battery for renewable energy storage by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch

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Energy Dome uses CO2 for long-term power storage for solar energy

Longer-term energy storage is a drag, and a lot of battery tech has been focusing on “how quickly can we charge these batteries so I can drive my EV for another couple of hundred miles.” That’s a fundamentally different problem than trying to capture the power of the sun for 12 hours, before releasing the power for the next 12 hours while the moon is doing its lazy stroll against the nighttime sky.

Energy Dome today announced the close of its $11 million Series A fundraise, with the goal of deploying the first commercially viable CO2 battery in a demonstration project in its native Sardinia, Italy.

The company told us that a CO2 battery’s optimal charge/discharge cycle ranges from four to 24 hours, positioning it perfectly for daily and intra-day cycling. It points out that this is a fast-growing market segment, not well served by existing battery technologies. Specifically, the hope is to charge the CO2 battery during the daytime when there is a surplus of solar-generated power, before discharging during the peak evening and nighttime hours, when demand for electricity outpaces what solar can deliver. Because, well, I’d hate to feel the need to spell this out for ya — but there’s no sun at night.

Built using commodity components, the company claims that its CO2  battery achieves a 75%-80% round-trip efficiency. Perhaps more interestingly, though, is that the operational life for the batteries is projected to be in the neighborhood of 25 years. If you’ve been keeping an eye on other power-storage solutions, you’ll have made a mental note that the operational life of most other solutions starts to degrade significantly by the time it hits the one-decade mark. The company projects that considering the whole lifecycle cost of its product, the cost of storing energy will be about half of the cost of storing with similarly sized lithium-ion batteries.

The tech is pretty neat — the company is using CO2 in a closed-loop cycle where it changes from gas to liquid and back to gas. The company itself is named after the “dome” component of the solution — an inflatable atmospheric gas holder filled with CO2 in its gaseous form.

When charging, the system draws electrical power from the electric grid, which drives a compressor that draws CO2 from the dome and compresses it, generating heat. The heat is stored in a thermal energy storage device. The CO2 is then liquified under pressure and stored in liquid CO2 vessels, at ambient temperature, to complete the charging cycle. When discharging, the cycle is reversed by evaporating the liquid CO2, recovering the heat from the thermal energy storage system and expanding the hot CO2 into a turbine, which drives a generator. Electricity is returned to the grid and the CO2 reinflates the dome without emissions to the atmosphere, ready for the next charging cycle. The system has up to 200 MWh in storage capacity.

The round was led by deep tech VC firm 360 Capital, while a number of other investors round out the investment round, including Barclays’ Sustainable Impact Capital program, a division of the banking giant Barclays that takes an impact investment approach, Geneva-based multifamily office Novum Capital Partners and Third Derivative, a global climate technology startup accelerator founded by RMI and New Energy Nexus.