Japanese industrial giant Sumitomo Heavy Industries (SHI) has recently invested $46 million in UK Company Highview Power, and their long-duration energy storage. Together the two companies will look to expand Highview’s CRYOBattery, which is a liquid-air energy storage (LAES), into America, Europe, and Asia.
CRYOBatteries provide clean, reliable, cost-efficient long-duration energy storage, by using air liquefaction technology. When air is cooled to -196°C (-320˚F), then it becomes a liquid. Highview Power’s CRYOBatteries store this in heavily insulated low-pressure containers that can rapidly re-gasify the liquid and increase its volume by 700 times, providing enough energy to power up to 200,000 houses for an entire day.
With this latest investment from SHI, the technology can now be brought to other nations around the world.
Sumitomo SHI FW CEO Tomas Harju-Jeanty commented on the new agreement:
One of the biggest barriers to a carbon-free future has been the ability of renewables to perform as reliably as, and as cost-effectively as traditional fuel sources. Highview Power’s long-duration energy storage technology not only solves the problems that enable dispatch-able renewables but will be a catalyst in bringing the energy transition forward.
Javier Cavada, CEO of Highview Power also left a comment:
By partnering with a large technology company with the reputation of SHI, we will be able to benefit from their vast know-how, resources, and operating experience in diversified markets.
While talking with Recharge last year Javier Cavada discussed how much more cost-effective LAES systems are. As reported by Recharge, according to Lazard financial advisors, a LAES 100MW system would have a Levelized Cost of Storage (LCOS) of just over $100/MWh. Comparing that to a new pumped-hydro plant would have an LCOS of $152-198/MWh, with a comparable lithium-ion system costing $285-581/MWh.
Cavada stressed the importance of this new agreement in his comments to Greentech Media:
For Sumitomo Heavy Industries, this is not a venture capital investment — this is a strategic bet. This is a huge corporation that sees this [technology] as a cornerstone of its future. This investment is way bigger than all the money that was invested before into the company.
Highview Power has two small scale pilot-plants in the UK, and have started a large-scale CRYOBattery facility located in northern UK that will have a capacity of 50megawatts/250 megawatt-hours they hope to have operational by 2022. They also have plans to build a large-scale, long-duration energy storage facility in Vermont.
