Electrical and heat storage using specially nanocoated salt (NCS) could be economically competitive with pumped hydro, SaltX has said, with a large-scale demonstration facility inaugurated in Berlin, Germany.
Headquartered in Sweden, SaltX has been “working with salts for 15 years”, the company’s marketing director Eric Jacobson told Energy-Storage.news today. This specific application for the salt-based energy storage technology has been in development since customers began expressing an interest in seeing it scaled up a couple of years ago, Jacobson said.
Last Thursday, SaltX and its project partner Vattenfall inaugurated the first 10MWh system based on the technology, in Spandau, Berlin. The pilot plant has an output of 0.5MW, Jacobson said, with energy utility Vattenfall installing the system at one of its combined heat and power (CHP) plants, Reuter-C.
“It’s been known for a while that you can store energy in salt, and there’s been two problems with doing that,” Jacobson said.
“First, the salt is highly corrosive so the application itself has been really expensive because you need special material as the salt starts to corrode the metal and eventually it will be destroyed. Secondly, when you are discharging this thermal battery the salt content has agglomerated, started to lump together. So after 60 cycles you lose the properties of the salt and it starts to not be so efficient.”
Claiming to have solved this problem by applying a proprietary material – patented as far back as 2013 – as a nanocoating to salt crystals, which prevents this corrosion and the agglomeration, Jacobson said that it will require tanks of inexpensive metal to store the material, without the need for pressurisation inside. SaltX claims this will make the technology easier to scale up to larger and larger capacities of storage.
“We use a technology where, it’s similar to an engine and a fuel tank, so the salt is the fuel and it’s really easy to scale this tank up and then we have a reactor or engine where we can take out the energy or the power.
“Whether we want 10MWh or 100MWh of storage, that’s not a big deal for us. That’s one of our advantages.”
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