Turning a waste-management problem into a resource
Harvesting unwanted energy to heat water and living spaces.
Clean energy is here to stay, but it has its challenges. When the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing, solar and wind generators need backup; most people can easily understand this.
But the opposite is also true. If the wind is blowing, but power demand is low, power companies have to shut down wind generators. If you’ve ever driven by a wind farm and noticed only a few of them had turning blades, you’ve witnessed this. The rest aren’t broken, there’s just nowhere for the power to go.
On a sunny day when most people are at work, solar farms can have far more capacity than needed. But taking them offline only to switch them on again later, known as curtailing, can be very expensive – so much so that in some cases power companies have paid other regions to take their surplus power.
Storing this surplus energy can smooth out these peaks and valleys. This has created a $21 billion and growing market for grid storage, which makes installing and using more renewable energy generators far, far cheaper for industry – which means cheaper for consumers.
But grid storage mega-projects cost hundreds of millions of dollars in batteries and construction, along with NIMBY court challenges, environmental studies, land acquisition costs, on-site transformer yards, running high voltage power lines to and from the power storage installation, and ongoing maintenance.
TESS technology wipes out those costs. Instead, TESS units turn waste energy where it isn’t wanted into home and water heat where it’s needed.
Common Sense Solution
The average Canadian household uses most of its energy heating water and keeping the house warm throughout winter.
Rather than using grid storage or curtailing excess energy, when there is an energy surplus the power providers send a signal to TESS units on the network, activating them to take in this load.
TESS units use this surplus energy to heat a thermal mass inside them, storing it. Imagine a brick warmed by the electric heating element on your stove. Then imagine that brick insulated so it cools very, very slowly.
When needed, the heat is trickled back to the household for hot water and warm living spaces.
TESS units can also pump heat from where it isn’t wanted and store it for later use, thus providing cooling for living spaces, server racks, large compost piles, and so on. When scaled up they can be used to cool greenhouses, industrial operations, and data centers.
Imagine heating your home and hot water from your backyard compost heap!
TESS units are plumbed to existing hot water tanks and central blown air furnaces or in-floor heating systems using off the shelf plumbing and heat exchange components, heating the water tank and living space.
TESS Mark VIII residential scale prototype,
about the size of a refrigerator
A unique approach
The concept of thermal energy storage systems isn’t in itself unique. What sets TESS apart is that our units:
- are installed at, and the energy is stored at, the household level
- use a low pressure pumped water system, slightly lower than city water pressure
- operate at 85°C
- can also be used for cooling
whereas other residential thermal storage systems
- are installed at the district level with tall, thick silos and/or warehouses full of equipment and thermal mass
- use steam, requiring expensive high pressure lines and valves
- operate at 400+°C
- can only take in surplus electricity
Whether compared to fields of batteries or to other thermal storage systems, TESS units are far more compact, far safer, and far cheaper.
Along Come Data Centers
While TESS technology was being developed, AI and data centers ccame onto the scene in a big way. Seemingly everywhere large data centers are popping up, with high demand for cooling.
These data centers have a voracious appetite for water; they can use up to 19 million liters (5 million gallons) of water per day just to meet their cooling needs.
Locals are concerned that the water typically used for this cooling will, after evaporation, end up dumping concentrated contaminants back into the local water supply.
TESS units are designed to take in energy from a variety of sources. Surplus grid electricity. Waste heat from compost and landfill bioactivity. And waste heat from data centers.
“While everyone is chasing the data center goldrush, we’re over here selling picks and shovels. It isn’t as glamorous but it’s the sure, steady money maker.”
D’Arcy Mann
Inventor,
TESS technology
Power 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 signals to shunt power to TESS units when the grid has surplus energy the only notable 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 reducing or eliminating heating bills for TESS unit households.
In short, 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.
Rather than curtailing the surplus power, industry can send the power to TESS (Thermal Energy Storage System) units which are installed at the household or small business level.
When there is surplus power generation conditions, rather than industry spending hundreds of millions on battery storage or curtailing the power output, they send a signal which activates TESS units on the network.
The TESS units take in the surplus power at about 4,500 watts per unit by using the surplus power to activate heating elements within the units. This heat is then stored within the units and trickled back to the household as water heating and space heating.
Data Center Cooling
The insatiable appetite for computer processing of modern society is seen in its most condensed state inside data centers. They’re incredibly thirsty, requiring a substantial portion of local available water for cooling.
- Data center developers are increasingly tapping into freshwater resources to quench the thirst of data centers, which is putting nearby communities at risk.
- Large data centers can consume up to 5 million gallons (19 million litres) of water per day, equivalent to the water use of a town populated by 10,000 to 50,000 people.
- With larger and new AI-focused data centers, water consumption is increasing alongside energy usage and carbon emissions.
TESS technology can provide data center cooling by pumping that heat away and storing it in large TESS units. The heat can then be used for office or water heating, parking lot and walkway heating, and/or controlled venting to atmosphere.
Because the cooling system is a closed loop of fluid, there is no need for local water supply consumption and no danger of condensed contaminants being put back into the local water table.
Home heating and cooling
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.
On the Canadian prairies, heating an average single family house with a Natural Gas Furnace (95% AFUE) costs $150 – $350 a month in winter. Electric Resistance Heat (Baseboard/Central) jumps that price to $400 – 900 per month.
TESS units turn waste energy where it isn’t wanted into home and water heat where it’s needed, reducing or even eliminating those bills.
- With renewable electricity, TESS top up the input heat whenever the grid needs a load to reduce surplus power.
- With waste heat from a compost heap, a room full of computer servers, or any other similar source of excess heat, the heat energy is pumped into the TESS.
Throughout the day some of that heat energy is used to maintain hot water in the supply tank and used to heat the living space as required.