It is 50% cheaper than lithium-based batteries



Sardinia, Italy, is known as a world-famous tourist destination. It will now also be known as home to the world's first CO2 battery launched by a startup called Energy Dome.

The role of carbon dioxide in heating the planet is well recognized. While countries are making efforts to reduce their carbon emissions, there is also a need to capture the carbon dioxide currently being released to ensure that the planet's warming remains under control.

To achieve this, many look to capture carbon directly from the atmosphere and store it. However, Energy Dome plans to use gas to store energy. The best part is that the method is highly scalable and uses ready-made products, according to a company press release.

How does the technology work?

Energy Dome's energy storage solution isn't nice to look at, but the technology that makes it work is absolutely fantastic. The company uses CO2 gas where it can be condensed and stored as a liquid at room temperatures.

As the company's founder and CEO Claudio Spandesini explained to Bloomberg in an interview last month, co2 is compressed at normal temperature and pressure (stored in a huge dome) to turn it into a liquid form. The heat generated is then stored during this process. This is a shipping process and can be used to store energy from renewable energy sources such as wind or solar energy.

When energy is needed, stored heat is used to heat liquid carbon dioxide, which turns into gas that is then pushed through the turbine to generate electricity.

The whole process is a closed loop system, where carbon dioxide is not released into the atmosphere. Better yet, the technology does not use any rare ground elements such as lithium or cobalt but only uses steel and water. So it can be implemented anywhere, everywhere.

Rapid scaling is possible.

Energy Dome began operations in February 2020 and in a short period of time was able to move from concept to MW-wide testing. The company attributes its success to a team of experts with a proven track record in turbine machinery, process engineering and energy, as well as a new industrial process that integrates components efficiently, the press release said.

The company is confident that its technology can be deployed not only anywhere on the planet, but also at less than half the cost associated with a lithium-ion battery storage facility with similar capacity. The Sardinia battery is also evidence that CO2 batteries can be deployed using existing supply chains without any major bottlenecks.

Although the press release does not disclose the battery storage capacity recently launched, it states that the company is now operating on a full-size plant with a capacity of 20-200 MW per hour that is expected to be operational by the end of 2023.