A few days ago, we wrote about EnerVault, a somewhat stealthy company in the hot storage market.
CEO Craig Horne then contacted us and provided some more details. Not many, but some.
The company is working on a flow battery, the same concept being touted by Deeya Energy and another startup called Primus Power (no camp stove affiliation known.)
Flow batteries are named that because electrolyte flows through them in what can be a continuous cycle. Electrolyte is pumped through a reactor that converts chemical energy to electricity. Spent electrolyte is then recovered for recharge while newly energized electrolyte is pumped back in. Deeya's redox flow batteries – which started shipping its first units this month – are aimed at providing a low-cost alternative to installing banks of lithium-ion and other advanced batteries at power stations or other remote locations.
Deeya's units can provide around 2 kilowatt/hours of energy. It is selling them first to cellular companies to provide power to cell towers in india but it will expand into providing power storage for utilities. The units cost $4,000 now but the company is aiming at getting them down to $1,000.
Horne wouldn't say what kind of chemistry is behind EnerVault's batteries but he says they are aiming at large-scale, utility-like storage.
Another key thing with EnerVault is the founding team. They've been all over the storage market. Horne himself has 21 years in materials science fuel cells at batteries. Vice president of engineering Darren Hickey comes from Bloom Energy. He was an original team member there and the lead stack designer. (He studied under University of Arizona's
K.R. Sridhar, the co-founder of Bloom.) We initially thought more employees came from Bloom, but one of the early engineers is still pretty interesting.
Other EnerVault execs include Kim Kinoshita, who has been at United Technologies, U.C. Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley Lab for forty years. Kinoshita has also written books on carbon electrochemistry and oxygen electrochemistry. And then there is Tom Colson, an expert in injection plastic molding and mass manufacturing. He used to be the vice president of manufacturing at Tesla.
There will be a greater number of execs moving into storage. It's the latest "Google of Greentech." But keep in mind it is a varied market. There will be companies that provide technology that stores power for only a few milliseconds to a few minutes. These devices will be used to balance loads. Other devices will store power persistently. The underlying technologies vary: lithium-ion batteries, lithium-air batteries, zinc-air batteries, Stirling-powered generators, flow batteries, solid oxide fuel cells, hydrogen fuel cells, zeolights, phase-change materials, flywheels, compressed-air storage, pumped hydro, sodium batteries, etc.
