Despite renewable energy’s growing popularity, there hasn’t been a great solution developed to store it — until now. Cache Energy develops renewable energy storage and works to make it more accessible.
Cache Energy is a technology start-up run out of Research Park and supported by EnterpriseWorks.
“Renewable energy sources like solar and wind, they’re not always available, and you need some form of storage technology to store the energy and use it at a later time,” said Amulya Nimmagadda, Cache Energy’s director of research and development.
Existing renewable energies have made great strides in replacing fossil fuels, but storing excess energy for shortages is key to unlocking their full potential.
“General storage technologies like lithium and batteries, they cannot scale well, and also they cannot store over very long durations,” Nimmagadda said. “So that’s where Cache Energy’s technology comes, where we can do energy storage for months of time and do it in a cost-competitive fashion.”
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Cache Energy has developed pellets based on limestone and calcium oxide. Once put through a thermochemical reaction, these materials perform as reusable batteries for renewable energy.
According to Senior Materials Engineer Paul Ginsberg, using limestone — a very abundant resource in the United States — allows the company to keep prices affordable for the consumer, which is one of its main focuses.
In addition to the pellets, Cache Energy created technology for a reactor that initiates the thermochemical reaction.
“You can think of the storage material as fuel that runs the car,” Nimmagadda said. “You also need the engine to put the fuel in. So that’s where our reactor technology comes into place, where we build a reactor, which can do the storing and releasing energy process with the storage material.”
To store the energy, the pellets are put through the reactor, where they are dehydrated, and the energy from the heat is transferred to the pellets.
“You could charge it in one location, ship it elsewhere on a train or truck,” Ginsberg said.
These can be used as an energy source for both industrial and residential applications.
According to Nimmagadda, once ready to disperse the energy, the pellets are put back into the reactor, where moisture, like water or steam, passes through them, creating calcium hydroxide and releasing the stored energy.
The company is looking to apply these technologies in places with volatile climates and access to sunlight.
“One big use case that we’ve found is in northern climates where they have a lot of sunlight in the summer months but then lots of darkness and cold in the winter months,” Ginsberg said. “There’s lots of interest in it, and it can help people out.”
Cache Energy is currently working on a pilot demonstration in Alaska, a state well-known for its abundance of sunlight in the summer and almost 24-hour darkness during the winter.
One of Cache Energy’s most recent updates is the new warehouse it opened last November in Champaign. The expansion has allowed the company to keep all branches of operations within Illinois.
Previously, the company would have to ship its pellets to other states that housed the reactor to test its effectiveness. According to Ginsberg, the addition helped communication and improved materials. Since the reactor depends on the materials and vice versa, efforts are much simpler because the operations are now under one roof.
“It has been game-changing that we own our own place, and we also have all these facilities to enable us to test our technology to its fullest potential,” Nimmagadda said.
Keeping operations in the Midwest provides other perks for the company trying to keep costs low.
“Some of the equipment that we use in our reactor is similar to what farmers would use in their farming operations,” Nimmagadda said. “So being in the Midwest also gives us leverage in buying these off-the-shelf components and repurposing them to be used in our technology.”
As Cache Energy continues to develop its technology, the company helps society move closer to a reality where renewable energy is accessible and affordable for all.
“It is paramount to have good, reliable storage technology in place to be able to leverage the renewable energy that’s being generated on a daily basis,” Nimmagadda said.
