Charlotte Delaney spoke to Jacob Ahlqvist, MD at SynchroStor, which recently received a share of £30 million from government for designing and testing innovative technology to store renewable energy
Tell us about how SynchroStor was set up
SynchroStor was founded in 2017 by Professor Win Rampen. He was very keen to transfer his know-how from his previous work in high-pressure hydraulics and see if he could do something in the energy storage space. He was aware of what’s called the Brayton loop – which is the thermodynamic cycle that underpins our system – being used for energy storage concepts, but none of those had worked out. Win had some ideas based on his previous experience and thought about setting up a project to look at it and that’s how SynchroStor was born.
What is the Pumped Thermal Energy Storage (PTES) that you are developing?
We’re developing Pumped Thermal Energy Storage (PTES) with the aid of a substantial grant from Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ). PTES is using heat to store energy; a modular, scalable storage solution for use within modern electricity grids. We take electricity in, and we use our design of high temperature heat pump to create a stream of hot gas to heat up a ceramic that gets put in a hot store, like a big thermos of hot material. Once that heat has been exchanged, the gas is still at a very high pressure, so we can run it through an expander, then it gets very cold. The gas goes through another heat exchanger, and we end up with a store of very cold material. So, we’ve got a store of heat and a store of cold after we’ve taken electricity in from the grid. Then we can reverse the process. We can take the heat and the cold out of the stores to generate electricity and export it back to the grid. That’s why it’s called pumped thermal, because we’re pumping heat around the Brayton loop, with a CoP (coefficient of performance) greater than 1.
How does PTES compare with other energy storage technologies?
We use sustainable and innocuous materials, making it suitable for a variety of locations, with no complicated supply chains, and risk of polluting its neighbouring environments. These key features allow a wide range of users to consider the PTES without worrying about sacrificing land area.
Another feature distinguishing the PTES from other energy storage technologies is its use of synchronous generators, with almost instantaneous response, which offer inertia to the grid and ability to offer frequency services to the grid. Those attributes are valuable as conventional fossil fuel-based generating plants are being retired.
The cost of the SynchroStor PTES is forecast to be competitive with storage solutions currently on the market, with the added benefit of significantly lower costs for longer storage durations.
Who are your customers?
As part of the general decarbonisation of the world, there are endless opportunities for energy storage to be used by people who are generating, distributing or using electricity. Wind or solar farm owners for example, might want to have energy storage on site, so they can generate more when it’s windy or sunny, then choose when they export to the grid. There might be days when it’s so windy they can’t export everything to the grid at the same time, so they could store up some of that electricity and export it on days when the grid is less congested. National Grid, who are moving electricity around the grid, might have pinch points in local areas where there’s a lot of use – it might help if they were able to store up energy locally at substations, for example, so that they can distribute energy at a steadier pace in some parts of the grid, then export it in little bursts. If, in a certain area, everybody is charging an electric vehicle at 6pm, they might want a store of energy available in that area. Then, there are longer term things, such as houses switching from gas boilers to heat pumps and large areas that are starting to draw more electricity but the transmission and distribution networks haven’t had time to build out to the grid in that area, so having storage would help. Also the big end users like supermarkets, for example, might have a big distribution warehouse, buying electricity in quite high volumes which they can buy off-peak and then store.
What more do you think needs to be done, as a country, to meet our net zero targets?
Energy efficiency – personally or on a business, industrial level. But that’ll only get you so far. The route is to roll out more renewables, more wind power, more solar, even the more challenging sources like wave and tidal power, hydropower. The unique thing that demand response and storage can bring to all those is that it can help balance out supply, because it’s not sunny 24 hours a day, it’s not always windy. Government has got a strong role to play and what we’ve seen over the last ten to 20 years, is that the UK has been at the forefront of putting in mechanisms to help, particularly the transition from onshore wind and offshore wind, for example. The UK has been a real champion of that.
Visit synchrostor.co.uk
