We have designed this to work best up to 500 degrees to function as an industrial battery, says Magnus Rambraut, Project Director for Business Strategy at Yara.
For ten years, Yara has been developing a patented and ammonia-free salt that can store surplus energy from solar and wind power. Kyoto Group has collaborated with Yara to use their salt mixture for their thermal batteries, to store surplus energy, for the Nordjyllandsværket power plant outside Aalborg in Denmark.
Yara has verified the properties of the salt in the desired temperature range through a large EU-funded pilot project in Portugal, together with many other partners. The project has revealed the degree of corrosion, emissions, stability, and degradation, as well as how the salt should be stored, transported, and melted. Between 80 and 130 degrees, the salt mixture is like warm honey and olive oil, but at its melting point of 131 degrees, the salt mixture becomes almost as thin as water. We have designed this to work best up to 500 degrees to function as an industrial battery, but it can withstand 525 degrees with some degradation over time, says Magnus Rambraut, Project Director for Business Strategy at Yara.
We believe that the thermal batteries we produce, where we use Yara’s salt, because of its wide temperature range, will play a significant role in decarbonizing industry, says Camilla Nilsson, CEO of Kyoto Group. The industry worldwide consumes 25,000 TWh of energy annually, and most of it is produced with gas or coal. All of this must be electrified, and salt batteries could meet 45 percent of this energy demand, concludes Nilsson.