A new CO2 battery can cut the cost of solar energy storage in half.

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Energy Dome just announced the closing of its $ million Series A funding round. The Italian company will use that new money to develop and demonstrate its CO battery technology, which will greatly improve solar energy storage , a press release reveals.

The CO battery will take care of storing renewable solar energy during the day when there is a surplus of energy and release it at night and during peak hours. It will also greatly reduce the performance degradation problem faced by lithium-ion battery solutions.

Making solar and wind energy '/ dispatchable'

With massive new solar farm projects in development, such as the US$ billion, ,-acre Mammoth Solar Farm, the world increasingly needs efficient methods to store renewable energy. Ac   Caseno Email List   cording to Energy Dome, its “modular and scalable energy storage solution will allow solar and wind generation to be dispatched hours a day.”



Unlike lithium-ion batteries, whose performance degrades significantly after about a decade of use, the CO battery maintains the same performance over its years of expected operating time. This means the cost of storing energy will be about half that of a lithium-ion battery with equivalent storage space, explains Energy Dome.

The company's CO battery uses carbon dioxide in a closed-loop cycle, during which it is converted from a gas to a liquid and then back to a gas. The “dome” from which the company gets its name is an inflatable atmospheric gas tank that is filled with CO in its gaseous form. During charging, the system uses electrical energy from the grid, which powers a compressor that extracts CO from the dome and compresses it, generating heat that is sent to a thermal energy storage device. The CO is then liquefied and stored in containers at room temperature, completing the charging cycle.

The cycle is reversed in the discharge process by evaporating that liquid, recovering heat from the thermal energy storage system and expanding the hot CO in a turbine that drives a generator. The CO battery has approximately MWh of storage capacity, Energy Dome says.

The world 'needs effective, low-cost renewable solar energy storage'

Energy Dome's latest funding round was led by venture capital firm Capital and includes investors such as Barclays' Sustainable Impact Capital program and a climate tech startup accelerator called Third Derivative.

“Grid systems around the world need efficient, low-cost storage to match renewable energy,” said Claudio Spadacini, founder and CEO of Energy Dome. “We are excited to leverage this investment and agreement to accelerate our deployment of this transformative technology. "We thank all the supporters who made today's announcement possible."

It is important to note that the CO battery will not release CO during the charging and discharging processes. Still, the company will likely need a lot of CO to scale its system, meaning that in the future it will be able to use gas extracted by carbon removal plants, such as the direct air capture facility ( DAC) under construction in the UK. Such a development would mean that the CO battery would greatly improve our ability to store renewable energy while helping the world eliminate the substance that is causing it to turn to renewables in the first place.