We’re incredibly excited to announce our recent investment in Exergy3, an Edinburgh University spinout building modular, high-temperature thermal energy storage that enables the electrification of industrial heat.
Energy use in industry makes up nearly a quarter of our annual greenhouse gas emissions. Most of that energy is used to provide heat to the processes we use to make chemicals, food, materials and more to support our modern lives and almost all of that heat (especially at temperatures exceeding 200°C) is delivered by burning natural gas on site. Burning natural gas produces carbon dioxide - hence the emissions challenge.
One of the best pathways to reducing emissions from industrial heat is to generate the heat with electricity, rather than from gas. Doing this allows these industrial processes to benefit from the continued reduction in emissions intensity of electricity generation as renewables scale and even to consider running off their own dedicated renewables production. There’s three big problems though. Firstly, electricity is on average more expensive than gas. Secondly, electricity prices can vary dramatically during the day, from low (or even sometimes negative) when there is more production than demand, to very high, when there are lots of concurrent demands and lower generation capacity (e.g. in the evening). Finally, clean renewable energy, like wind and solar, is highly intermittent. None of these are good for industrial processes that often need to run 24/7.
That’s where thermal energy storage comes in. If you can make heat when the electricity prices are low and produced by renewable sources, then store it for use when prices are high and renewables are unavailable, you can reduce the cost of the transition from gas to electricity dramatically. To make this really work you need storage that is cheap, fast charging, physically flexible and easily integrated into your existing system.
The team at Exergy3, led by CEO Dr Markus Rondé and CSO Dr Adam Robinson, are developing a thermal battery that stores heat at up to 1200°C with higher energy and power density than existing solutions. This enables not just better performance, but also the modularisation of this tech - rather than building a massive bespoke installation for each customer they can manufacture modules which customers buy in order to right-size their storage. This approach will allow them to drive down costs through manufacturing learning rates and less expensive on-site engineering.
Exergy3 has already proven their tech in the lab and are now building a pilot facility in partnership with Annandale Distillery, Cochran and the UK government. This £1m funding round, led by ZCC alongside investments from Old College Capital (Edinburgh University) and Scottish Enterprise will help the team accelerate innovation, deployment and business development.
We can’t wait to work with them to help them grow. Welcome Exergy3!
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