Heat Batteries That Glow Like Toasters
Antora Energy raised $550 million in Series C funding, bringing its total corporate and project financing to roughly $1 billion. The company makes thermal batteries: electricity passes through a resistance heater to warm solid carbon blocks to extreme temperatures, and the heated blocks emit controlled high-intensity light that can generate power or produce industrial steam. Their largest project, a 5-gigawatt-hour system at a Poet biofuels facility in Big Stone City, South Dakota, converts affordable wind energy into steam for ethanol production and is expected to come online later this year. It would rank among the largest battery storage installations in the world. Antora plans to build a second US manufacturing facility and is signing agreements with data center operators, chemical plants, and food and beverage companies. Thermal storage solves a problem lithium-ion batteries cannot: industrial heat, which accounts for a large share of emissions in sectors where electrification has been slow.Antora Energy raised $550 million in Series C funding, bringing its total corporate and project financing to roughly $1 billion. The company makes thermal batteries: electricity passes through a resistance heater to warm solid carbon blocks to extreme temperatures, and the heated blocks emit controlled high-intensity light that can generate power or produce industrial steam. Their largest project, a 5-gigawatt-hour system at a Poet biofuels facility in Big Stone City, South Dakota, converts affordable wind energy into steam for ethanol production and is expected to come online later this year. It would rank among the largest battery storage installations in the world. Antora plans to build a second US manufacturing facility and is signing agreements with data center operators, chemical plants, and food and beverage companies. Thermal storage solves a problem lithium-ion batteries cannot: industrial heat, which accounts for a large share of emissions in sectors where electrification has been slow.Expert summary pending. Showing the newcomer version.