Fourth Power commissions demo system poised to set world record

Fourth Power — which takes electricity, stores it as heat for hours to days, and provides it back as electricity — just commis­sioned a demon­stra­tion system for its technology. That’s great news. Hospitals, homes, data centers, EVs, and industrial facilities need affordable, reliable, clean electricity. More variable generation like wind and solar combined with higher and longer peaks in demand due to weather events and demand growth means we need better storage that can supply smoothing and ramping. The more flexible the asset, the better it will work in a wide range of futures.

That’s why we picked Fourth Power, the only grid-scale storage company we’ve invested in. Fourth Power’s technology has very high energy density, so it does not require much land and is made out of a compar­a­tively small amount of material. It is also made of widely available material, almost entirely carbon, instead of things that have precarious and pollutive supply chains like critical minerals. Finally, Fourth Power’s system is flexible and efficient. This combination of features means its system is low-cost and highly valuable to our electricity grid. 

The demon­stra­tion system, which can store 1 MWh of power (commercial scale will be 1 GWh), will be used to prove out high-temperature operations (think over 2,000 C) and power conversion with ther­mopho­to­voltaic cells (like regular PV cells, but for heat instead of light) — keep an eye out for record-breaking announce­ments later this year. The team will also gather data to continue to confirm their predictive calcu­la­tions, substan­tiate items that verify their tech­noe­co­nomic analysis, and provide confidence to their customers. 

This culmination of research and innovation is a huge milestone. The foun­da­tional technology being scaled by Fourth Power was invented by Dr. Asegun Henry while a professor at Georgia Tech and MIT and funded by the US Government. Now, backed by VCs and the next phases of non-dilutive capital like that received from the State of Mass­a­chu­setts, Arvin Ganesan, Dr. Henry, and an experienced leadership team have moved the tech out of the lab and into the world — and are marching quickly towards commercial deployment.