(Finance) – “This innovative system is an exercise in freedom and independence. Today is a happy day but we must remain humble, united and dream of a more sustainable world thanks to innovation. Our goal is to completely decarbonise companies that use fossil fuels. to have warmth and we want to do it without any geopolitical dependence, without depending on rare materials or precious materials which, in addition to being the subject of wars for their hoarding, are also subject to financial fluctuations; stones do not have this type of inconvenience “. That’s what he said Ernesto Ciorra, Enel’s Innovability Directoron the sidelines of the inauguration of the Thermal Energy Storage (TES), the innovative sustainable energy storage plant based on rocks, the first in the world on an industrial scale, installed at the Enel site of Santa Barbara, in Tuscany, in the municipality of Cavriglia (Arezzo).
The TES was inaugurated today at the Enel site in Santa Barbara. What does this innovative rock-based storage system consist of?
“This system is very simple: we heat the rocks, they keep the heat and when we need the heat they give it back by throwing water on it that generates hot steam. We can heat the rocks using the steam from the power plant, as happens here, but the goal is to heat them using renewable energies. In doing so, using renewable energies and thus producing heat, we could power all companies that today need heat that is produced by burning gas. This system makes us free from gas, free from rare raw materials that they are used in common batteries – such as lithium -, and makes us much more flexible and free to integrate thermal systems, like this one, together with renewables, guaranteeing better performance to the electricity grids. What we want to do is to free ourselves completely from gas, not only from Russian gas, and we are finding technological solutions that allow us to do so. Also why use it as an alternative, as some say and, the hydrogen to be burned, being hydrogen a product of electricity with very low efficiencies for those so-called ‘hard to abate’ sectors in which it seems impossible to decarbonise, is a crazy bullshit “.