Green Energy Storage, the battery that makes the energy transition possible

The battery of the future, the one capable of transforming the much-vaunted energy transition into reality, could see the light of day in Trentino. And not in decades, but in a handful of months. “We will have the first pre-commercial prototype built by the end of this year,” he confirms Salvatore Pintopresident of Green Energy Storage, the Trentino company that leads the project. There is the project, there are the technological skills, thanks to an international team attracted by the challenge, and now there is money, lots of it: in recent months the project (which proposes itself as a protagonist in the new generation battery supply chain) has received an IPCEI (Important Projects of Common European Interest) loan of over 59 million euros, of which 53 to GES and 6.5 to the Bruno Kessler Foundation.

But how will this pile in which the European Commission believes so much work? “The secret is in the ‘chemistry’ that we put in one of the two tanks”, replies Pinto, a manager with top positions, among others, in Olivetti, Pirelli, Telespazio, Finsiel, Tap. Looking at it, now that it’s only a prototype, the “battery of the future” is reminiscent of the Little Chemist: two connected tanks from which pipes and cables depart, with an electronic device in the centre. And how it works, as told by those who are working on it, appears extremely simple. When the current to be stored arrives, it triggers a chemical reaction in the first tank which releases hydrogen and it is compressed and stored at low pressure in a second tank. When electricity is needed, the hydrogen is brought back into contact with the chemical solution in the first tank: the molecules recombine, recomposing the initial liquid and releasing electricity. With one advantage over the use of hydrogen as it has been conceived so far: in that case the production and use of hydrogen to generate electricity are separate. In the GES battery everything happens in one relatively compact device.

“We started in 2014 after reading an article about natures and having used a Harvard University patent that used quinine and bromine, but that’s the origins. And bromine is toxic”, says Pinto. “Now we have another technology, two different ‘chemicals’ patented in Italy”. At the moment, the formula of the two solutions is top secret, so as not to give any advantage to the competition, because GES does not it is the only company working on this type of battery, but the composition must meet fundamental requirements.

“At the base is the goal of becoming independent of lithium,” explains Pinto. “So the raw materials must be available in Europe and in Italy. In addition to being green, recyclable and available at low cost”. Then they have to guarantee competitive performance. “For batteries, the density and the number of recharge cycles are fundamental”, continues the president of GES. “Ours will work for 15 thousand cycles against the 4 thousand of lithium batteries. However, lithium is denser and therefore allows you to build much smaller batteries”.

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In short, it is difficult, at least in the short term, for cars and mobile phones to be powered by this type of device. The target market is rather the domestic one, or photovoltaic fields, where excess electricity needs to be stored. “However – explains Pinto – we are also making progress in terms of density: with the first quinine version it was 30 watts per litre, with the new chemistries we hope to reach 150 watts per litre”.

But Pinto goes further, not taking for granted that the electric future of the car is what we imagine. “When all cars are electric, the grid won’t be able to support all the charging columns. Instead, I imagine cars with our battery and distributors similar to the current ones. But rather than putting petrol, they will draw our ‘exhausted chemistry’ from the tank injecting an equal charged amount”. It is no coincidence that GES plans to land in the USA: “We are in Trento, because we work with FBK which has one of the best nanotechnology laboratories, but next year we will open our office in Colorado: the United States will be one of the main markets for storage systems. Without batteries, the energy transition cannot be done”.