Noon Energy has been successfully operating its 100-plus-hour battery for multiple months, the company announced today. And the demonstration of the long-duration energy storage system ended up with far more capacity than the company had originally pitched; it ultimately operated for thousands of hours over the course of the test, with over 200 hours of storage capacity.
The system is a reversible solid oxide fuel cell battery that relies on carbon and oxygen, with tanks and power blocks that can fit inside standard shipping containers. Chris Graves, co-founder and CEO of Noon Energy, told Latitude Media that he believes it’s the first fully containerized system for multi-day to seasonal energy storage to operate for such a long period of time.
The news comes as Noon Energy, which was founded in 2018 and is based in Palo Alto California, is fundraising for its next round and prepares to kickstart manufacturing. The company raised a $28 million Series A, led by Clean Energy Ventures, in late 2022.
Ultra-long-duration energy storage systems like the one Noon is advancing are widely considered an important missing link for hard-to-decarbonize sectors that require constant, reliable power. As Graves explained, one of their main applications is “solar and wind intermittency balancing, to make them 100% firm and reliable, like a power plant asset.”
Recent dramatic load growth and demand for clean firm power — especially from the data center sector — have created new urgency for developing long-duration energy storage options. Both startups and established companies are trying to commercialize technologies from flow batteries to pumped hydro. One of the most high-profile is Form Energy, which has raised over $1.2 billion from venture capital, growth equity, and strategic corporate investments and started deploying its first commercial 100-hour iron-air batteries last October.
However, Graves says, Noon’s system can do 100-hour-duration storage more cheaply than most of its peers — and, more importantly, with a smaller footprint.
Energy density and cost
Much like a flow battery, Noon’s system has two tanks and a power block, which is a ceramic- based elevated temperature fuel cell. The system circulates inexpensive carbon dioxide from the storage tanks, and when it is charging, the electricity powers the ceramic to split the carbon dioxide into solid carbon, which stays, and oxygen, which is released to the air. To discharge, the system sucks in fresh air, and the fuel cell recombines the new oxygen with the stored carbon, turning it back into carbon dioxide and generating electricity.
“One important aspect of this ultra-long-duration storage application is” the fact that, in the system, the power and the energy are decoupled, Graves said. The system’s power is defined by the size of the power block, while the energy duration of the system is defined by the size of the tanks. This means that you only need one power block, and then you add capacity by adding as many tanks filled with inexpensive carbon dioxide as required. “That’s why you can add more and more tanks for very low cost,” he added
While flow batteries need to dissolve their electrolytes in water, Noon’s system uses carbon, a solid and highly energy-dense fuel. This allows Noon to fit the same amount of energy into a space that is significantly smaller than a flow battery. And because the storage media is cheap — simply carbon and oxygen — the system costs are also low.
“We’re five to 50 times more compact or higher energy density than everything else out there that we’ve seen,” Graves said. For example, Noon Energy estimates that a 150-megawatt data center looking to install a battery system covering its entire energy use would need a Noon Energy system occupying roughly 20% of its footprint. The company is targeting $20 per kilowatt-hour. For comparison, utility-scale lithium-ion battery systems can have costs of up to $300 per kWh, while flow batteries can go as high as $600. Form Energy, meanwhile, is also targeting $20 per kWh.
Now that Noon Energy has gone through its prototype stages and scaled up to containerized systems, the next challenge is “scaling to manufacturing,” according to Graves. “We’ve gotten to a technology readiness level…that is high enough to start producing units on a production line, so that’s our next big goal,” he said.
