By Nick Toscano
Sites near some of Australia’s largest coal-fired power stations are being assessed for their potential to house giant domes filled with carbon dioxide, which could store solar energy and help drive the grid’s shift away from fossil fuels.
Italian startup Energy Dome has emerged as one of the most prominent players in the rapidly expanding market for long-duration energy storage, winning major contracts to roll out its technology in Europe, the United States and India.
A rendering of what Energy Dome’s energy storage system could look like in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley.
The Milan-based firm is now targeting opportunities in Australia, where the impending shutdowns of coal-fired power plants are adding urgency to the search for creative ways to store renewable energy when it’s plentiful, so it can be used overnight or at other times of low wind and sunlight.
Energy Dome’s facilities, which store carbon dioxide gas in giant flexible bladders, work by drawing excess energy from the grid during daylight hours to compress the gas into a liquid form. At night, they convert it back into a gas, which can drive a turbine to generate electricity.
The company is in talks with Australian officials to identify possible sites to deploy its unique dome-shaped storage systems around coal-fired power stations in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley, said Daniel O’Doherty, its vice president of business development in Australia. It is also in the early stages of planning a project at Muswellbrook in the NSW Hunter Valley, he said.
“We are working with government to identify the best sites for our technology,” O’Doherty said.
“What makes our projects valuable and more appealing is if there is existing infrastructure – and the Latrobe Valley has existing substations, and high-voltage transmission.”
Energy Dome will establish its Asia-Pacific headquarters in Melbourne.
Victoria’s Climate Action Minister Lily D’Ambrosio said Energy Dome’s plans would be positive for the state’s energy transition, and was optimistic that its “ground-breaking” long-duration storage technology could prove successful and help cut consumers’ power bills.
While coal still makes up more than 50 per cent of east-coast electricity supplies, officials think it could be gone from the grid entirely by as early as 2040, making Australia’s transition to renewables one of the fastest in the world. But in a grid that’s soon to be dominated by intermittent wind and solar, the energy market operator warns a sharp lift in investment in assets that can store renewable energy will be critical to keeping the lights on.
So far, electric utilities and governments have been mostly focusing on building out a fleet of grid-scale lithium-ion batteries, which absorb surplus renewable energy to inject critical bursts of power into the grid when needed. Another prominent storage technology is pumped hydro, which uses motors to pump water uphill to a higher reservoir, then release it downhill to spin turbines connected to generators whenever the grid needs topping up.
However, both technologies have their limits: today’s batteries exhaust their stored energy in two to four hours of maximum output, minimising their ability to plug longer solar or wind shortfalls. Pumped hydro, meanwhile, can run for many hours or days, but requires significant height differentials over short distances, such as mountain ranges, which the industry says makes it difficult to carry out construction on time and on budget.
As Australia’s shift from coal to renewables continues at pace, proponents of long-duration storage technologies argue the deployment of assets that can dispatch for beyond eight hours looms as the “missing link” needed to ensure a smooth energy transition. Among the other long-duration storage technologies being planned across Australia are concentrated solar thermal, which uses thousands of mirrors to focus solar rays on receiver points to capture heat and store it; compressed-air storage, which pumps air into underground chambers; and vanadium redox flow batteries, which use different chemistries to lithium-ion batteries and are typically longer-lasting.
Following Energy Dome’s successful start-up of a 2.5-megawatt demonstration plant in Sardinia, O’Doherty said interest in its technology, which can run for 30-plus years without degrading, was “surging” as the company neared completion of a full-scale 200-megawatt unit. It has been awarded a contract from Alliant Energy in the US, and NTPC, India’s largest power company, he said.
“While there are many long-duration energy storage concepts out there, very few are on the verge of delivering power to the grid,” he said.
Victoria’s Minister for Economic Growth and Jobs Danny Pearson said Energy Dome’s move would bring world-leading technology to Melbourne, create jobs and contribute to the state’s economic growth.
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