The UK Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) recently awarded £350,000 to a consortium comprising the University of Birmingham Centre for Energy Storage (BCES), Aggregate Industries and Liquid Air Energy Storage (LAES) systems developer Innovatium for the successful development of Prisma The liquid air energy storage system, which stores thermal energy in the form of liquid air through a potential energy cold store filled with phase change materials, is expected to cost £114/MWh for energy storage, with a target installation cost of £400/kWh, and the commercial product will be Suitable for PPA, especially when combined with solar PPA, the estimated LCOE is between $0.15/kWh-$0.30/kWh.
The Prisma system will be manufactured in the North East of England, with the aim of installing the first industrial-scale behind-the-meter system in early 2023. Innovatium has now completed a £900,000 investment in Prisma product development.
The LAES system stores thermal energy in the form of liquid air, provides on-site compressed air and works through a potential energy cold store filled with phase change material (PCM) designed and tested by Innovatium in collaboration with the University of Birmingham. PCM can absorb, store and release a large amount of latent heat within a certain temperature range, and is often used for cooling photovoltaic modules at the research level.
PCM materials for liquid-air energy storage work at low temperatures below -150°C, and they store and release large amounts of thermal energy between freezing and thawing cycles. Innovatium is currently working with researchers from the Universities of Birmingham and Strathclyde to develop a special formulation that does not degrade over time, making it safer and more environmentally friendly than conventional batteries. The phase transition temperatures of the two phase change materials are -100°C and -160°C, respectively. Phase-change materials are composite materials, usually composed of phase-change materials, structurally stabilizing materials, and heat transfer-enhancing materials.
