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The Origin: Grid Stability That Lowers Housing Costs
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 can be very expensive – so much so that in some cases power companies have paid other regions to take their surplus power.
Taking this surplus energy from the grid and storing it can smooth out these peaks and valleys. This has created a $21 billion and growing market for grid storage, which will make installing and using more renewable energy generators far, far cheaper for industry – which means cheaper for consumers.
Tess Research founder D’Arcy Mann saw an opportunity. In Canada alone, about 81% of a household’s energy budget is used for heating hot water and the living space we inhabit.
Why not take that surplus energy and store it as heat? This would drastically reduce or even eliminate residential heating bills, making housing more affordable, while providing an industry-controlled load on the grid to send the surplus power to.
- No need for industry to invest in grid storage megaprojects and all the NIMBY fights that come with it
- Power generators can send surplus electricity to TESS units when there is more electricity being generated than demand calls for
- The heat is stored in a thermal battery, ready for use to heat homes and their hot water on demand
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.
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.
“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 residential scale prototype
Common Sense Solution
Our thermal energy storage system (TESS) technology stores energy as heat for later use.
This means adding grid storage at the residential or industrial level, rather than megaprojects that cost power generators hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars.
TESS technology works at the residential level for space and water heating
TESS technology works at the industrial level for data center, greenhouse, or other industrial cooling
This means the power industry doesn’t have to have the land acquisition, NIMBY, or environmental study headaches nor the expense of installing thousands of batteries which need to be maintained and periodically replaced. TESS technology makes all of that go away while providing the benefit of grid storage.
The Benefits
THE BEST INVENTIONS SOLVE MORE THAN ONE PROBLEM
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 hookups to shunt power to TESS units when the grid has surplus energy the only other 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 providing free heating to TESS unit households.
Data Centers
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.
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!
Residential 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