Thursday, April 24, 2025

Energy Dome launches world’s first CO2 battery for long-duration energy storage

Italian company Energy Dome has announced the successful launch of its first CO2 Battery facility in Sardinia, Italy. The milestone marks the final de-risking of the CO2 Battery technology as Energy Dome enters the commercial scaling phase, becoming the first commercial long-duration energy storage technology on the market offering a reliable alternative to fossil fuels for dispatchable baseload power globally.

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The Energy Dome CO2 battery uses carbon dioxide to store renewable energy, such as solar and wind energy, over a long period and release it quickly. Energy Dome says the technology can be quickly deployed anywhere in the world at less than half the cost of similar-sized lithium battery storage facilities.

Energy Dome began its operations in February 2020 and has progressed from a concept to full testing at a multi-megawatt scale in just over two years. This successful launch is also in part due to the unique nature of Energy Dome’s process, which integrates known components in a novel industrial process based on a thermodynamic transformation of CO2.

The CO2 Battery technology is based on a closed-loop thermodynamic process that efficiently stores energy by manipulating CO2 under different state conditions. In charging mode, the CO2 is compressed and stored under pressure at ambient temperature in a high-density supercritical or liquid state. In discharging mode, the CO2 is expanded into a turbine and stored back into an atmospheric gasholder, releasing the energy to the grid in a closed-loop system with zero-emission to the atmosphere.

The battery can offer a Levelised Cost Of Storage (LCOS) as low as US$50-60 per MWh within a few years, whereas lithium batteries are sitting between US$132-245/MWh. Besides, Energy Dome’s thermodynamic liquid-CO2 system has a round-trip efficiency of 75-80% – higher than any other long-duration energy storage technology currently on the market, including liquid-air, compressed-air, and gravity-based solutions.

Energy Dome is now preparing for its first full-scale 20MW-200MWh plant. Its first commercial project, Commercial Operation Date, is expected to be deployed by the end of 2023.

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The company has already secured multiple commercial agreements, including with an Italian utility A2A for the construction of the first 20MW-5h facility. Earlier this year, Energy Dome also signed a non-exclusive license agreement with Ansaldo Energia, a major provider of power generation plants and components, to build long-duration energy storage projects in Italy, Germany, the Middle East, and Africa.

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