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A New Type of Battery, Made of Concrete
How one company is thinking ‘outside the blocks’ and storing energy in concrete towers
A couple of hours south of Zürich, Switzerland, in the Canton of Ticino, you’ll find a battery made out of concrete blocks. Energy Vault, the Swiss clean energy firm that built it, is about to go public via a SPAC merger with Novus Capital Corporation II.
The sun doesn’t always shine, nor does the wind always blow. Neither lines up exactly with when we use the most electricity. As a result, renewable energy has an issue: How do you balance out demand with supply (lack or excess thereof)? One answer has been through energy storage. Batteries.
You may have already heard about Tesla’s utility-grade mega-battery packs, or perhaps even pumped hydro — where excess electricity is used to pump water up into a dam’s reservoir to be turned back into electricity later. But there are other types of batteries. For example: blocks of concrete!
I know what you’re thinking: “How can blocks of concrete store energy?” The answer can be found in high school physics. Just like with pumped hydro, the trick is converting electricity into potential energy — a type of energy store with the potential to be turned back into electricity — by driving a generator.
