A Sodium-ion Battery developed by Malta Inc

A sodium-ion battery proposed by Malta Inc. The energy storage company incubated at The Moonshot Factory (formerly Google X Labs) until the end of 2018, is currently lagging behind its competitors in long-term energy storage. However, with a group of investors among the world’s most famous billionaires, including Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Richard Branson, Jack Ma and Michael Bloomberg. It is very likely that Malta Inc will succeed in developing its sodium-ion battery.

A Sodium-ion based thermal battery

Malta Inc. is exploring a new avenue for long-term storage with its pioneering use of heat-trapping sodium, says Energy Storage News. Malte’s process uses renewable electricity to power heat pumps that store heat in molten salt and cold in a refrigerated liquid. If necessary, a heat engine converts the temperature difference between the stored heat and cold into electricity. According to the company, the technology can store energy for more than six hours and be charged thousands of times before its performance degrades. The simplicity of its materials – salt, steel, antifreeze and air – gives the system an estimated 20-year life span.

The need for long-term storage systems in the future

Huge amounts of low-cost, long-term energy storage will be needed if the global power system is to operate primarily on intermittent renewables-to provide carbon-free stored energy when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine.

“The hope is to create low-cost, long-lived energy storage as a way to effect, stabilize and inject resilience and reliability into grids around the world… Something that would really be the foundation for the ability to transform electricity markets, and thus enable an energy transition,” Ramya Swaminathan, CEO of Malta, tells Reload News. “And it’s really a global market. It’s a global problem.”

Sodium-ion battery solution Malta

Malta Inc will work with industry partners to transform the detailed designs developed and refined at X into industrial grade machines for its first pilot system. The Malta system can store electricity for days, even weeks, until it is needed, PR Newswire says. Electricity can come from any source (wind, solar or fossil fuels) and from any location. Malta has the potential to make existing investments in fossil and renewable energy generation more productive, while significantly improving the stability and resiliency of the electricity grid.

“The lack of affordable and reliable grid-scale energy storage currently limits the transition to renewables. Malta se technology gives us a chance to store all the renewable energy we create in a reliable and inexpensive way. As X has done its part to take the Malta technology as far as it can go, we are pleased to hand over the baton to the Malta team for the next phase of product development and deployment,” said Raj Apte, PhD, scientific advisor at X, The Moonshot Factory.