The French company Babcock Wanson is conducting research and development into high-volume energy storage in the form of heat.
Babcock Wanson, a subsidiary of the CNIM Group, offers a complete range of products and services for industrial boilers to help industries save energy. The company’s objective with its energy storage technology - EMR’Stock - is to match energy production and consumption via a system capable of converting and storing a large quantity of energy (10-100 MWh) in the form of heat.
The $5.5 million project, whose research and development is being funded partly by the Aquitaine Region and the BPI (French business funding and development body), will be rolled out in three phases. The first, from 2015 to 2018, will be devoted to designing the whole system and developing each of its components (energy conversion system, storage media, etc). The second phase, which is called THERM’Stock and will run from 2016 to 2019, will comprise studies, manufacture, installation and the testing of an industrial-scale prototype. Lastly, the third phase, from 2020 to 2026, will focus on producing, marketing and installing storage units throughout the world.
