Challenges
Renewable energy is a vial component of our need for decreasing greenhouse gas emissions. The difficulty with renewable energy like wind and solar is that power is generated when it’s windy or sunny, regardless of how much power is needed at the time. If not enough people need that power at that second, it’s wasted.
This is why you often see a field of wind generators where only a few are actually turning; it isn’t that the rest are broken, it’s that there’s nowhere for the power to go. But it isn’t that there are too many wind generators or solar farms – they’re required for those times when there is a large demand for power from the grid.
Shutting down generators can be brutally expensive – so much so that sometimes power companies pay others to take their excess power, rather than bear the larger cost of taking generators offline then back on again when more power is needed locally.
Grid storage can smooth out these peaks and valleys. This has created a $21 billion and growing market for grid storage of surplus energy, which will make installing and using more renewable energy generators far, far cheaper for industry – which means cheaper for consumers.
But industrial scale grid storage requires industry to spend huge amounts of capital on land acquisition and all the headaches of constructing a megaproject, while spending years on environmental impact studies and fending off NIMBY complaints.
Meanwhile Canadians spent about $30 billion a year on household energy. Most of the energy (81%) is used for heating homes and water, and the top heat sources are natural gas, electricity and home heating oil. Burning fuels contributes to global warming.
What if housing could be more affordable with one less energy bill?
What if one major source of combustion pollution was to shrink to almost nothing, reducing greenhouse gasses?
What if renewable energy could be cheaper with no need for industry to spend on these megaprojects?
What if one technology could make all that happen?
“If you want to make energy storage dirt cheap… why not make it out of dirt?”
DONALD SADOWAY
John F. Elliott Professor of Materials Chemistry,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
TESS Mark VIII prototype
Common Sense Solution
Our thermal energy storage system (TESS) technology stores energy at the residential level; this means creating storage for the grid without making it the sole responsibility of power producers, saving them hundreds of millions of dollars
Instead, producers can offload excess power from renewables to home owners with TESS units. This energy is stored in the TESS thermal battery as heat, which is given back to the homeowner as free or deeply discounted hot water and home heating!
It’s a win-win for producers and home owners alike.
But not only can TESS take in surplus power from the grid; it can store energy / heat from multiple sources, including:
- Surplus energy from solar power
- Surplus energy from wind power
- Heat from the core of a large compost heap
- Heat from a data centre, crypto mining operation, or other rooms full of servers
The Benefits
THE BEST INVENTIONS SOLVE MORE THAN ONE PROBLEM
Home
Canadians spent about $30 billion a year on household energy. Most of the energy (81%) is used for heating homes and water, and the top heat sources are natural gas, electricity and home heating oil. Burning fuels contributes to global warming.
According to StatsCan: “The cost of home heat is rising. Canadians will burn virtually anything to stay warm in the winter, whether it be natural gas, fuel oil, electricity or wood. Unfortunately, the price of all these heat sources is rising.
The price of fuel oil and other fuels was rising at the fastest pace year over year in November 2022, up 73.4% from the same month a year earlier.
Canadian households were also paying more for natural gas (+23.7%) and electricity (+1.6%) year over year.”
Because TESS technology replaces burning fuel with energy from surplus sources, a TESS unit could allow homeowners to heat their house and water with low cost or even free heating. Say goodbye to heating bills!
Industry
The global grid-scale battery energy storage market was estimated at roughly 21 billion U.S. dollars in 2021, and growing. North America was the largest region in terms of market size that year, with a size of nearly 800 million U.S. dollars.
If this seems low, it is. That’s because to deploy grid storage at the industry level, power producers have to buy land, buy equipment, pay a workforce to install the equipment, and pay to hook it all into the grid with new towers, transformers, and lines. And in between, there are years of environmental studies and battles with Not In My Backyard (NIMBY) groups that want the benefits grid storage brings, but understandably don’t want fields of batteries and equipment near their houses.
All of this makes industrial grid storage an expensive headache for industry.
TESS technology is the cure for that headache. TESS units are installed at the residential level as a consumer product at consumer expense, like a furnace or air conditioning unit.
With the exception of SCADA hookups to shunt power to TESS units when the grid has surplus energy the only other notible cost to industry is the surplus power itself – power they would otherwise pay others to take or spend even more in shutting down renewable systems, only to have to bring them online again hours later through expensive switching equipment.
In other words, TESS makes those expensive grid storage megaprojects go away, saving industry billions of dollars, while providing free heating to TESS unit households.
Environment
The media breathlessly reports on newer technologies like heat pumps, but the reality is just over half of Canadian households that reported having a primary heating system in 2021 had a forced air furnace (51%), while less than 1 in 10 households were heated with a boiler with hot water or steam radiators (8%) or a heat pump (6%).
TESS technology converts those forced air furnaces into air circulators, eliminating the need for the furnace to burn natural gas or fuel oil. TESS provides the heat source, with the energy stored in the TESS coming from renewable or waste heat sources.
Less combustion means less greenhouse gas emissions!
TESS units are self contained within their 120cm x 60cm footprint, making for a compact installation next to existing furnace or water heater in most homes with basements. For elevated foundation housing, such as those in northern communities with permafrost, the TESS is placed in the garage or on a concrete pad.
Unlike geothermal or other in-ground systems, TESS technology requires no digging – a definite plus in northern communities where preservation of the permafrost is a concern
How It Works
TESS EXPLAINED
Instead of a natural gas, fuel oil, or a wood pellet burning furnace heating your home, TESS technology replaces burning fuel with surplus renewable electricity; or with surplus heat energy from other sources.
TESS takes in surplus energy and store it as heat at the residential level.
- With renewable electricity, TESS top up the input heat whenever the grid needs a load to reduce surplus power.
- If the energy source is waste heat from a compost heap, a room full of computer servers, or any other similar source of excess heat that would normally be undesirable, the heat energy is pumped hydronically into the TESS.
Throughout the day some of that heat energy is used to maintain the hot water in the building and, when needed, used to heat the home living space as required.
By diverting surplus power to TESS units and helping to stabilize the grid, TESS makes the installation of small and medium wind and solar stations more economically viable for power companies, which can make their installation into microgrids far more likely.
Sree Vyah Solar Farm
The Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation and Canadian Utilities, an ATCO company, have completed Canada's most northerly off-grid solar project in the remote Yukon community of Old Crow.