Energy Vault announces partnership with CEMEX

Energy Vault is an Idealab company that creates renewable energy storage products. The company has announced the commercial availability of new, transformative, and utility-scale energy storage technology. Combining potential and kinetic energy with a proprietary, cloud-based software platform, the technology orchestrates the positioning of the massive concrete blocks that provide the basis for the efficient storage and discharge of electricity. The blocks are positioned with a newly developed and fully automated six arm crane. The Energy Vault system uses low cost and environmentally-friendly waste debris concrete materials, allowing the system to achieve both a significantly lower cost per kilowatt hour and high round trip efficiency, while also delivering a 30 to 40 year life. This is all alongside no degradation in storage capacity.

Energy Vault states that it has eco-friendly advantages over existing chemical storage solutions. This is particularly the case because the company’s storage conduit – the large concrete bricks – do not degrade over time, eliminating the need to replace equipment. The concrete bricks are combined with Energy Vault’s system design and proprietary algorithm-based software. This calibrates energy storage and subsequent electricity discharge, while also accounting for various factors including power supply, energy demand volatility, and weather.

The company’s technology collaboration and development agreement with CEMEX enables the joint technology teams to focus on material applications. This includes the optimisation of the concrete and soil composite materials that form an integral part of Energy Vault’s storage solution. In addition, the collaboration will also focus on methodologies for the reduction of CO₂ and carbon. It is thought that this is particularly important given the role that utility-scale energy storage will play in enabling various renewable energy technologies.

“This world needs rapidly scalable and sustainable energy storage solutions to meet one of the most urgent challenges – the need to decarbonise our energy generation – and we are thrilled to launch Energy Vault’s unique technology to help solve this problem,” said Robert Piconi, CEO and co-founder of Energy Vault. “In addition to the vital environmental benefits that it provides, the system’s radical reduction in cost per kilowatt hour and overall levelised cost of storage enables our customers to provide dispatchable and baseload power cheaper than fossil fuels for the very first time. We are also excited to begin our important collaboration with CEMEX, whose innovation in material composite technologies and global footprint will help accelerate achieving our collective sustainability goals.”

“Energy Vault’s team has developed a disruptive platform and we are enthusiastic to work with their team to deploy an environmentally efficient and cost-effective energy storage solution that is highly viable,” said Dr Davide Zampini, Head of Global R&D and IP at CEMEX. “We share a common commitment to enable a future where resources are used responsibly, which is paramount to CEMEX’s strategy for sustainable development.”

“Innovation in energy storage represents the largest and most near-term opportunity to accelerate renewable deployments and bring us closer to replacing fossil fuels as the primary resource to meet the world’s continual growth in energy demand,” said Bill Gross, co-founder of Energy Vault and founder of Idealab. “We are excited to support Energy Vault in bringing this groundbreaking technology to the market.”

Energy Vault is an Idealab portfolio company and creator of renewable energy storage products.

CEMEX is a global building materials company that provides high-quality products and reliable services to customers and communities in more than 50 countries.

Read the article online at: https://www.worldcement.com/europe-cis/09112018/energy-vault-announces-partnership-with-cemex/