A commercial-academic UK consortium has secured more than £350,000 (US$454,000) of government funding to develop a liquid air energy storage (LAES) system.
Partners building material company Aggregate Industries, energy tech firm Innovatium and the University of Birmingham, said the funding would be used to take its Prisma (peak reduction by integrated storage and management of air) technology “from initial laboratory testing to full operation in an industrial environment”.
Aggregate Industries said Prisma “is an innovative LAES technology that stores energy in liquid air form to provide compressed air, allowing inefficient partially-loaded, variable-demand compressors to be turned off, thus improving the total system efficiency by up to 57%”.
Prisma will bring together “an innovative latent energy cold storage tank, filled with a phase change material (PCM) to store thermal energy, and a number of other off-the-shelf components to form a system”, that will work with Aggregate Industries’ existing compressed air network at its Bardon Hill quarry in Leicestershire.
The PCM will be developed at the University of Birmingham’s School of Chemical Engineering. Innovatium will design, manufacture and assemble system components before installation of the system at Bardon Hill.
To date, Prisma has only been deployed in a simulated environment and is said to be at ‘technology readiness level 5’ (TRL5), in terms of the development and commercialisation of the technology.
The funding will take Prisma to ‘proven deployment in an operational environment’ (TRL7)— “a crucial step towards full commercialisation”, the partners said.
Yulong Ding, professor of chemical engineering and director of the Birmingham Centre for Cryogenic Energy, said: “PCMs are growing in importance but to date the focus has been on hot forms of thermal energy and technology deployment has taken place outside the UK. This new project focuses on cold forms of thermal energy storage… allowing us to establish a platform to deliver a global first-of-a-kind system in the UK with the potential to revolutionise the industrial energy space.”
The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy has funded the two-year project through the government’s ‘Industrial Energy Efficiency Accelerator’ (IEEA) programme— administered by the Carbon Trust.
Last December, a grid-scale LAES system run by UK-based storage provider Highview Power— also backed by government funding— was named a finalist for the S&P Global Platts Global Energy Awards.
