Update- Three Articles
September 19, witnessed a group of designers crowding around a squat, silver cylinder resembling the size of a grill tank in the rear of a messy workshop at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, looking over the San Francisco Bay. Other than their intense stare on the adjacent computer system display, the only hint that a task was in progress was an orange glow noticeable in a small window near the bottom of the device.
These researchers at Antora Power are creating a new type of thermal energy storage, which is a rarely made use of a technique that maintains power in the form of extreme warmth or cold in a variety of substances, like ice blocks or underground rocks. In Antora’s instance, the substance inside the container was a block of carbon that, at that moment, was featuring temperatures well above 2,000 ˚C.
The approach they are pursuing allows utilization of excess electricity from solar or wind farms to warm up that material, and then transform the heat back into power when it’s required. Commonly in thermal storage, this is still done in the extremely inefficient two centuries old style: by developing steam that drives a turbine generator. However, a significant amount of energy gets lost as a result of mechanical rubbing, heavy steam leaks, and also other concerns.
Antora is evaluating a unique thermophotovoltaic system, which is something resembling a solar panel, but it transforms the infrared radiation coming off a hot maetrials, as opposed to sunshine, right into electric power. In late September, a lab experiment led the scientists to claim that they had set a new record by transforming more than 30% percent of the heat flowing to the cell back right into electricity. The scientists are intending to attain greater than 50% performance.
Source: GreenTech Review (October 25, 2020)
How Will Some New Startups Help To Solve The Grid Storage Problem?
https://greentechreview.online/how-will-some-new-startups-help-to-solve-the-grid-storage-problem/
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on a mission to commercialize ultra-low-cost energy storage to support the widespread deployment of wind and solar power
Antora Energy’s technology stores electricity as heat in extremely inexpensive raw materials and uses a novel thermophotovoltaic heat engine to convert that heat back to electricity when consumers need it, hours, days, or weeks later.
The startup, led by Stanford University alumni Andrew Ponec, BS ’17, and Justin Briggs, Ph.D. ’17, and MIT alumnus David Bierman, Ph.D. ’17, has recently demonstrated the world’s most efficient solid state heat engine, topping the performance of all previous thermophotovoltaic, thermionic, and thermoelectric devices. This breakthrough is a key enabler for Antora’s energy storage technology, and also opens up numerous other applications ranging from industrial waste heat recovery to flexible carbon capture, utilization, and storage.
“We think the ability to efficiently convert heat to electricity with a lightweight, low-profile device that can easily scale from watts to gigawatts without taking a performance hit will be a game-changer in energy storage and multiple other industries,” says Briggs.
Their recent demonstration of over 30% conversion efficiency has drawn substantial customer interest and validated their technology roadmap of achieving over 50% conversion efficiency. Multiple classes of customers have expressed that this current level of performance will meet their needs, so Antora is moving fast to deploy.
Antora Energy working in the lab. Credit: Marilyn Chung, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.
The Antora team is currently working with a power producer customer to develop and build a first customer-sited energy storage product.
With early support from the TomKat Center’s Innovation Transfer Program, Cyclotron Road, ARPA-E DAYS program, Shell/NREL GameChanger prize, FLOW Competition, and venture investors, Antora’s progress is building momentum and drawing attention. Their technology has recently been highlighted in articles by CNBC, Vox, and MIT Technology Review.
Source: Stanford University, TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy (March 18,2020) via Internet Archive
Antora Energy recently demonstrated the world’s most efficient solid state heat engine
https://web.archive.org/web/20201016232720/https://tomkat.stanford.edu/antora-energy-recently-demonstrated-worlds-most-efficient-solid-state-heat-engine
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Today, grid-scale energy storage is dominated by pumped hydroelectric installations, which provide storage at low cost but are geographically limited. Lithium-ion batteries are improving quickly, but materials sourcing challenges, high cost floors, and short cycle life limit them to short-duration applications. Other technologies, including new types of electrochemical cells, compressed air, hydrogen, flywheels, and electromagnetics, suffer from geographic, safety, or cost limitations. In short, there is a critical need for cheap and scalable energy storage.
Technology Vision
We are developing an extremely inexpensive thermal energy storage system. With a marginal cost of energy capacity of < $10/kWh, our thermal battery will take excess electricity from wind and solar power plants, store it for hours or days, and deliver it back to consumers when needed. By storing energy as heat in extremely inexpensive raw materials and converting that heat back to electricity with a high-efficiency thermophotovoltaic heat engine, our energy storage system costs are low enough to make intermittent renewable energy, plus storage, cost-competitive with fossil fuels. The Antora team has demonstrated the highest efficiency solid state heat engine in history.
Source: Activate
Antora Energy
https://www.activate.org/antora-energy
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Earlier article posted by Agcat at RG on March 15, 2018:
By Converting Heat to focused Beams Of Light A New Solar Device Could Create Cheap And Continuous Power
Credit: by James Temple MIT Technology Review
Standard silicon solar cells mainly capture the visual light from violet to red. That and other factors mean that they can never turn more than around 32 percent of the energy in sunlight into electricity. The MIT device is still a crude prototype, operating at just 6.8 percent efficiency—but with various enhancements it could be roughly twice as efficient as conventional photovoltaics.
Hot Solar Cells
- Breakthrough A solar power device that could theoretically double the efficiency of conventional solar cells.
- Why It Matters The new design could lead to inexpensive solar power that keeps working after the sun sets.
- Key Players – David Bierman, Marin Soljacic, and Evelyn Wang, MIT
– Vladimir Shalaev, Purdue University
– Andrej Lenert, University of Michigan
– Ivan Celanovic, MIT - Availability 10 to 15 years
The key step in creating the device was the development of something called an absorber-emitter. It essentially acts as a light funnel above the solar cells. The absorbing layer is built from solid black carbon nanotubes that capture all the energy in sunlight and convert most of it into heat. As temperatures reach around 1,000 °C, the adjacent emitting layer radiates that energy back out as light, now mostly narrowed to bands that the photovoltaic cells can absorb. The emitter is made from a photonic crystal, a structure that can be designed at the nanoscale to control which wavelengths of light flow through it. Another critical advance was the addition of a highly specialized optical filter that transmits the tailored light while reflecting nearly all the unusable photons back. This “photon recycling” produces more heat, which generates more of the light that the solar cell can absorb, improving the efficiency of the system.
There are some downsides to the MIT team’s approach, including the relatively high cost of certain components. It also currently works only in a vacuum. But the economics should improve as efficiency levels climb, and the researchers now have a clear path to achieving that. “We can further tailor the components now that we’ve improved our understanding of what we need to get to higher efficiencies,” says Evelyn Wang, an associate professor who helped lead the effort.
The researchers are also exploring ways to take advantage of another strength of solar thermophotovoltaics. Because heat is easier to store than electricity, it should be possible to divert excess amounts generated by the device to a thermal storage system, which could then be used to produce electricity even when the sun isn’t shining. If the researchers can incorporate a storage device and ratchet up efficiency levels, the system could one day deliver clean, cheap—and continuous—solar power.
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