[vc_row][vc_column width=”1/1″][vc_column_text]With summer fast approaching – and with it the likely onset of Australia’s next raft of power outages – governments and consumers across the nation are looking for solutions to the country’s energy crisis.
And heavily overlaying the outage issue is the fact Australian businesses and households are paying among the highest prices in the world to draw power from a grid that isn’t as effective as it could be.
Summoned to Canberra earlier this month by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, the leaders of Australia’s largest energy retailers were directed to ‘ensure no family pays a cent more for electricity than it needs to’. The Federal Government warned it could use regulation to force the hand of energy companies if they do not act independently to bring prices down.
While pricing is a critical issue, and one that requires the ongoing focus of the both federal and state governments, it is also vital to get the infrastructure right so businesses and households can rely upon and receive a consistent and effective supply of electricity.
In South Australia, which sources more than half of its local generation from intermittent sources such as wind and solar, Premier Jay Weatherill and his government have locked in plans to install a 100MW lithium ion battery to help stabilise energy supply to the state.
1414 Degrees – which welcomes the immediate term boost offered by battery back up – is planning a lower cost, longer life, multi purpose, alternative energy storage offering to the market.
Even as battery prices fall, our Thermal Energy Storage System (TESS) will remain considerably less expensive and will be far less complicated to install and maintain.
Additionally, because our TESS is environmentally benign – ensuring a low environmental impact with no emissions and no combustion – it doesn’t bring with it the associated costs of battery manufacture and disposal.
TESS is also scalable to many gigawatt hours – so it provides a truly grid sized solution, rather than the option of stacking many small batteries together. And better still, our planned >1GWh TESS can provide base load, continuous power to a grid and fast frequency response to support renewable generation.
But by far one of the most overlooked capabilities of our TESS is its ability to store energy as latent heat at a constant 1414 °C until it is required by the user.
With so many electricity consumers already purchasing power to turn it into heat (think of food processing, hospitals, large scale residential developments, process heating for industry, shopping centres and hydroponic farms), the TESS cuts out the middle man and takes heat directly to the market. In fact we estimate that 60% of the worlds energy is used to generate heat. The global market for heat is very compelling.
1414 Degrees continues to prepare for an IPO later this year to back the development of its 10MWh and 200MWh modules.
Pre-register here for a prospectus today.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]