IIT Madras startup is storing electricity for months with new breakthrough
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I want you to stop what you are doing and think about this for a second. What if you could take electricity, turn it into metal, shove it in a box, drive it across the country, and then turn it back into electricity six months later? That sounds like something a Bond villain would pitch to SPECTRE. But three engineers out of IIT Madras have just done it, and their startup Sthyr Energy might be one of the most important companies you have never heard of.
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Here’s the problem they’re solving. Right now, India produces a staggering amount of renewable energy via solar and wind. More than enough to light up entire nations. The problem with that though, is that they aren’t very accommodating. The sun doesn’t care about your energy surplus before it shines and produces energy. If there’s an excess of energy, then there’s nowhere to store that excess energy. No giant tank up in the sky that will take care of it. Excess electricity produced goes wasted. This wastage of electricity is known as energy curtailment.
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No existing battery technology can help much here. Lithium-Ion can store charge for a few hours only while flow batteries might last for one or two days. Long duration storage of energy at any scale hasn’t been solved yet, and that is the reason why the dream of clean energy eludes us all the time.
Sthyr’s solution to this problem comes in the form of zinc.
The way their system works is quite elegant. When you have excess energy, you use it to electrochemically produce metallic zinc from zinc oxide. The metallic zinc remains stable in a plate form for months and months without any kind of degradation. Whenever you want the energy back, you run the zinc through a zinc air battery that reacts with ambient air and a water based electrolyte to release the stored energy. Then the zinc converts to zinc oxide again and you can use it all over again.
The fact that the energy is in the form of solid metal, you can literally move it around in a car on the road – something you probably never thought would be possible in a lifetime.
The figures quoted are not too shabby either. An energy density of 550 Wh/l – three times that of a lithium-ion cell. With a backup time of more than 30 days.
Sthyr Energy is based in Chennai, currently in early stages, and backed by advisors from IIT Madras. Whether their technology performs at scale remains to be seen. But the concept is sound, the science is real, and if this works the way they say it does, the renewable energy equation just changed.
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