15-11-2023
Malta Inc, Alfa Laval, Siemens Energy and DLR to drive clean energy transition in Germany
Malta Inc, a world leader in long duration energy storage (LDES), announced that its German subsidiary was awarded a grant to support a €9-million effort to accelerate the German energy transition. Malta Hochtemperatur Wärmepumpen Stromspeicher GmbH, Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR), Alfa Laval, and Siemens Energy were awarded funding by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection (BMWK) to support Germany’s efforts to achieve Paris Agreement climate targets and to be climate-neutral by 2045.
Germany needs to electrify its heating sector and to ensure that expanded renewable power generation is available on-demand and around-the-clock. The grant will fund a technoeconomic analysis of the potential for Malta’s LDES technology to help decarbonize both electricity and heat generation in Germany. It will also support the expansion of DLR’s world-leading test facility for thermal energy storage in molten salts (TESIS) to validate an innovative, Alfa Laval-built heat exchanger.
“We are honored to partner with the German government and its leading national laboratory, the DLR, to explore how Malta’s technology can accelerate the transition off natural gas,” said Ramya Swaminathan, CEO of Malta. “This important work will identify how best to meet Germany’s decarbonization goals, create jobs in German turbomachinery manufacturing, and deliver a just transition by creating clean energy construction and operations jobs for the nation’s current energy workforce.”
Sigmund Brielmaier, Head of LDES at Siemens Energy, states: “Besides being the turbomachinery supplier for Malta’s technology, we are keen to contribute with our expertise to this project that enables the energy transition. LDES is a key to decarbonize the energy system and this project offers a great opportunity to explore new ways of decarbonized combined heat and power applications.”
Prof. Dr. André Thess, Director of the Institute of Engineering Thermodynamics at DLR, said: "As a globally leading research institution in the field of molten salt technology the DLR-Institute of Engineering Thermodynamics will be happy to contribute to the successful development of this important large-scale long-duration storage technology”.
Alasdair Maciver, Head of Energy Storage Solutions at Alfa Laval comments: "Energy storage is pivotal when driving the shift towards renewable energy sources. We are very pleased that our pioneering and highly efficient heat exchanger technology, tailored for Malta's energy storage process, will be running in actual operational settings. It is a milestone in the pathway towards competitive, long-term energy storage and the transformation of the European energy market into a more sustainable future.”
Malta’s innovative pumped-thermal energy storage (PTES) plant is a like-for-like replacement for fossil-fueled power plants. It generates 100-MW of clean power and 70-MW of clean heat, but it uses an industrial grade heat pump to replace the carbon emissions and volatile price of fossil fuels with zero-emissions, lowest-cost-available renewable energy. The heat pump converts the electricity to thermal energy, which can be stored for hours to days. When needed, a heat engine reconverts the thermal energy into clean power and heat, returning more than 90% of the original energy to the grid with little-to-no degradation over its 30+ year lifespan.
As an LDES asset, Malta’s technology allows utilities to reliably deploy vastly more wind and solar power without the risks of unavailability or wasting surplus generation. As a clean power plant, it delivers the same grid resilience and reliability services that fossil-fueled plants do but wind and solar do not. With among the best-available round-trip efficiencies, lowest system degradation, and longest plant life, Malta’s clean power and heat plant allows customers to make up lost ground on decarbonization goals.
In close collaboration with DLR’s Institute of Engineering Thermodynamics, led by Prof. Dr. André Thess, the partners will collaborate on analyses of:
- Use cases for long-duration energy storage in the electricity grid, including grid services, and heat grids;
- Suitable market mechanisms for long duration storage systems;
- Identification of sites for potential deployment; and
- Validation of an innovative Alfa Laval heat exchanger at DLR’s TESIS, the world-leading facility for high-temperature, molten-salt, thermal storage technology.
News Category:
-
Air Liquide's innovative large scale CO₂ liquefaction technology, Cryocap LQ, has been selected by Stockholm Exergi, Stockholm’s energy company, to contribute ...
25-07-2024
-
Airbus to boost sustainable aviation fuel production through investment in LanzaJet
Airbus is investing in LanzaJet, a leading sustainable fuels technology company and producer, in line with its ambition to act as a catalyst for the global development ...
25-07-2024
-
Lhyfe, one of the world’s pioneers in the production of green hydrogen, today announced a partnership with Elyse Energy, a pioneer in the production of low-carbon molecules. ...
25-07-2024
-
Sempra Infrastructure announces EPC contract with Bechtel for Port Arthur LNG Phase 2
Sempra Infrastructure, a subsidiary of Sempra, today announced that Port Arthur LNG Phase 2 and Bechtel Energy (Bechtel) have signed a fixed-price engineering, procurement ...
25-07-2024
-
Airbus partners with Avolon to explore future of hydrogen aviation
Airbus has announced a new partnership with aircraft lessor, Avolon, to study the potential of hydrogen-powered aircraft, marking the very first collaboration of the ...
25-07-2024
-
PETRONAS acquires land for carbon capture and storage hub in Peninsular Malaysia
PETRONAS, through its subsidiary PETRONAS CCS Solutions Sdn Bhd ('PCCSS'), has signed a land rental agreement with Kuantan Port Consortium Sdn Bhd ('Kuantan Port') to ...
25-07-2024
-
Repsol and Iberia sign an agreement with Inditex to use 5% of SAF for the transport of its air cargo
Repsol and Iberia have signed an agreement with Inditex for the purchase of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). The SAF used represents 5% of the fuel that Iberia uses to ...
25-07-2024
-
IPCEI funding approval paves way for progress at bp’s Lingen green hydrogen project
bp has been granted funding, provided jointly by BMWK and Lower-Saxony Government, as part of the European IPCEI Hy2Infra wave for a green hydrogen project in Germany. The ...
25-07-2024
-
DNV completes CCS directive guidance to facilitate sustainable CO2 storage in the EU economic area
DNV, the independent energy expert and assurance provider, has successfully supported the European Commission’s update of the four non-binding Guidance Documents (GDs) ...
24-07-2024
-
Newly commissioned terminal capacity expands availability of SAF at central and eastern US airports
Neste has commissioned terminal capacity at ONEOK’s terminal in Houston, Texas for blending and storing Neste MY Sustainable Aviation Fuel™. This is a major step ...
24-07-2024