Long-duration energy storage
Noon Energy
Founded by former NASA scientist Chris Graves, Noon Energy is developing a low-cost battery for medium-duration electricity storage. It accelerates the energy transition by fixing the intermittency problem of renewable energy.
Investment rationale
Challenge
Despite wind and solar power reaching 10% of the global power mix in 2022, electricity production still accounts for 23% of global GHG emissions. And while renewables have become cheaper than fossil fuel power, the challenge with renewable power is that it is intermittent. The flexibility to store power for when there’s no sun or wind is critical to scaling renewables further and to electrify everything we can. The majority of today’s medium-duration – or multi-day – grid-scale batteries are lithium-ion, but these are expensive to make and their performance degrades quickly. Many alternatives are under development, including batteries based on iron, sodium or iron, and alternative technologies such as flow batteries, and have the potential to be cheaper and longer-lasting. However, scaling these technologies effectively is a critical challenge.
Technology
Noon Energy is developing a low-cost carbon-oxygen battery technology that can store electricity for 100+ hours. Noon’s battery uses electricity to split carbon dioxide into powdery solid carbon and oxygen gas, which are stored separately. Electricity is discharged when the oxygen and carbon powder are exposed to one another. As the main material of this battery is cheap carbon dioxide, it is much cheaper, and less environmentally taxing, than regular batteries, for which materials such as lithium and cobalt have to be mined.
Competitive advantage
Noon has three qualities that few competitors in the space can claim: high energy density, high round-trip efficiency and low material costs. The company claims its carbon-based storage is three times as energy-dense as lithium-ion, meaning it can store much more energy in much less space. In theory, the technology could one day power the marine industry or long-distance trucking, two applications where even lithium-ion isn’t energy-dense enough for the job. For now, the technology is however best suited for grid flexibility, particularly in areas where the share of renewable energy is very high.
Founders
Chris Graves
CEO
Investment fund
Clean Energy Ventures
Focused on clean energy tech investments that have the potential to mitigate 2.5 gigatons of CO2 emissions by 2050.
