Energy storage is the new oil
Humankind is in the middle of a major energy transition. When we discovered fossil fuels, such as coal, it changed our lives forever, allowing production and travel at a scale never seen before. Over time, we learned that despite the many advantages, our use of fossil fuels is slowly turning our planet into an uninhabitable oven.
Luckily, we already know how to generate vast amounts of energy without emissions using solar power and other renewables. We just haven’t been able to deliver that energy at the right place and the right time. The new wave of battery startups is finally changing this, and rapidly.
The massive need for new energy storage solutions comes in several main forms. The most recognized one is electric vehicles (EV). EVs produce fewer emissions and cost less to drive and maintain, as electric engines are more efficient (70% instead of 30% energy efficiency) and have fewer expensive parts that break in use. Electrified cars are also able to re-capture motion energy that would otherwise be lost during braking. To capture brake energy, the car doesn’t even have to be fully electric, it just needs a re-capture and re-use system – including a heavy-duty battery.
For EVs, it’s not enough to merely carry a lot of energy in the car. The vehicles will also need to recharge rapidly to not pepper long drives with overly long breaks. This creates a lot of pressure for the grid and local energy storage at the charging points. Unlike car batteries, local storage doesn’t need to be mobile, but it needs to be able to store vast amounts of energy at a low cost and last long in heavy-duty use, all while causing as few emissions as possible.
As luck would have it, there are multiple Finnish startups tackling all the above challenges. Each focuses on one or a few areas, such as local or mobile storage or battery lifetime optimizations. They’re the result of the hard work of their founders and staff, but also national factors such as raw materials, local industrial ecosystem and demand, and continuous investments as well as training of new experts into the field by the government.
Get to know the most impressive battery startups from Finland
Akkurate – Battery lifetime monitoring and optimization software. Optimizing battery usage to increase its lifetime, forecasting the needs for maintenance or replacements, as well as evaluating and modeling the risks for insurance, financing and other related services.
AkkuSer – Recycling portable batteries. They extract valuable raw materials and deliver those to metal refineries, serving as material for new batteries and other demanding products.
Bamomas – Battery fleet management and optimization software that supports multiple battery technologies. They are able to provide a whole fleet management solution or integrate with existing ones.
BroadBit Batteries – Sodium salt based batteries that are cheaper, safer, more sustainable, and support a broader range of operating temperatures than most currently available batteries.
Geyser Batteries – Power batteries that last over a million charge cycles, are sustainable, can be produced from local materials all around the world, and are safe.
Teraloop – Their kinetic energy storage increases the utilization and reduces the costs of stationary energy storage. This sustainable solution can increase the utilization of an EV fast charge point by over 400% and reduce the capital cost of the storage by almost 70%. They’re well suited for enhancing distributed energy assets like virtual power plants and industrial process protection.
Interested to learn more? Read the full company bios from ecosystem.fi.
