MANY MINDEDAntora raises $550 million as its first utility-scale heat battery starts up
Antora Energy has closed a $550 million Series C, co-led by the climatetech investor G2 Venture Partners and Eclipse, a VC firm that backs manufacturing startups. The San Jose company said Thursday that the round brings its total corporate and project financing to roughly $1 billion in its eight years, and that the money goes toward expanding domestic production and building large projects faster.
The product is a thermal battery. Electricity runs through a resistance heater that drives blocks of solid carbon to extremely high temperatures and holds them there for days; the blocks then give off controlled blasts of intense light, converted back to power on demand or used to raise steam. Two months ago Antora began starting up its first commercial-scale unit, a 5-gigawatt-hour system built from more than 200 modules at Poet's biofuels plant near Big Stone City, South Dakota. It turns cheap wind power into the steam the plant needs to make ethanol from corn, displacing part of its coal-fired boiler load.
Industrial heat has been one of the most stubborn costs to bring down, because a factory that electrifies its heating ends up buying power at peak prices. Storage breaks that link: charge when electricity is abundant, release when it is not. Antora also worked with the utility Otter Tail Power on a rate that pays it to charge during local renewable surplus, and says it is pursuing similar structures elsewhere.
Next is a second US factory and a pipeline of signed agreements with data center operators and industrial customers that Antora declined to name. The South Dakota system will not be fully operating until later this year, and dozens of rival startups are chasing the same market with ceramic bricks, crushed rock and industrial waste.
Source: Canary Media