Can aluminium be used as ultra long term storage for renewable energy and heat?

A research consortium made up of nine partners from seven different European countries is investigating the development of a new storage concept based on aluminium which can be used to store renewable energies for both electricity and heat.

The Reveal project was initiated in July by the SPF Institute for Solar Technology in Switzerland which will serve as the research leader of the project, and is also being supported by the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme.

The focus of the project is to develop a new and potentially revolutionary concept for storing renewable energies over long periods of time – measuring in the months and even years.

Aluminium produced using a carbon neutral method developed by IceTec and Arctus would then be used for long-term energy storage, providing 15MWh/m3, an energy dense and more eco-friendly storage technique.

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Based on aluminium as an energy carrier, the new concept differs substantially from traditional energy storage mediums such as batteries or Power-to-Gas.

Importantly, the project hopes to be able to not only store renewable electricity, but also energy which can be used as heat.

According to the Reveal project’s initial announcement, even though short-term storage solutions are plentiful and low-cost and can be used to even out mismatches between production and demand, the “technologies for storing renewables for longer periods of months or seasons are scarce or costly and thus not widely used yet.”

On top of the gap between short- and long-term storage technologies is the increasing struggle to reduce dependency on oil and gas imports, especially in winter for heating buildings when solar energy resources are limited.

Reveal believe aluminium could be used to bridgie these gaps, including by storing the renewable electricity used in the production aluminium.

“What if exclusively renewable electricity is used for this process and most of this electric energy is not lost but stored chemically in the produced aluminium?” the researchers asked, in their initial press announcement.

“And what if this stored energy can be released at a much later time and in a different place again? Then aluminium becomes an excellent energy storage solution with an outstanding energy storage density. In fact, a one-meter cube of aluminium can store more energy than the same volume of heating oil.”

Ultimately, the Reveal project is looking to develop technologies that can produce aluminium from aluminium oxide without releasing any carbon dioxide emissions and using the aluminium for storing renewable electricity that can be used to subsequently produce heat and electricity.

The Reveal project is being co-funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme and the Swiss State’s Secretariate for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI). It consists of partners from Iceland, Slovenia, Norway, the Netherlands, Czech Republic, Germany, and Switzerland.