An innovative Scottish cryogenic scale-up has secured a £3m investment from the Scottish National Investment Bank and Hitachi Industrial Equipment Systems (HIES).
The funding will support Innovatium Group Ltd, based in the Torus Building, on the Scottish Enterprise Technology Park in East Kilbride, in accelerating the deployment of its patented, PRISMA Advanced Liquid Air Energy Storage system.
This is the first investment HIES, a Japanese multinational, has made in a Scottish company.
PRISMA, a trademarked system, provides a long-duration and flexible energy storage solution for energy intensive businesses. It aims to resolve the intermittency and fluctuating supply issues seen in renewable energy generation, and does so in a safer, more cost-effective and environmentally friendly way compared to current mainstream lithium-ion batteries.
A Liquid Air Energy Storage (LAES) system comprise a charging system, an energy store and a discharging system. The charging system is an industrial air liquefaction plant where electrical energy is used to reject heat from ambient air drawn from the environment, generating ‘cryogen’ or liquid air.
The liquid air is stored in an insulated tank at very low pressure, which functions as the energy store. When power is required, liquid air is drawn from the tank, pumped to high pressure and evaporated. This produces gaseous air that can be used to drive a piston engine or turbine to do useful work that can be used to generate electricity.
The award-winning Scottish technology is predominately made from fully recyclable materials.
It works by using off-peak electricity to cool and liquefy compressed air. It has been proven to reduce energy costs and CO2 emissions by up to 30% per industrial site.
The investment will enable Innovatium to grow its team, scale production and fast-track the rollout of the PRISMA system. The investment is expected to create 30 jobs in Scotland over the next four years.
The company, founded in 2017 by Simon Branch and Dr Adrian Alford, both with engineering backgrounds, describes its technology: “There are two main parts inside PRISMA. The thermal storage vessel is filled with a specially formulated material that stores a huge amount of cold air at -150C. This cold store allows us to liquify air and store it in the liquid air vessel ready for use on-demand.”
The funding will also support the scaling of the technology for use in data centres, where energy demand and sustainability pressures are causing global concern.
The company, which has also been recently supported by Kelvin Capital, has a VIBES Scottish Environment Business Award for its innovation. It has received Phase 9 grant funding from the Energy Entrepreneurs Fund.
In addition to investing, HIES will supply core compressor components for PRISMA and expand Innovatium’s sales through its Hitachi Global Air Power and HIES Europe divisions. This partnership opens new commercial opportunities for the company in international markets.
Brian Jack, CEO of Innovatium Group, said: “We’ve entered a new and very exciting growth phase for us which includes immediate plans to expand our team, advance PRISMA technology, and build additional depth within the business to meet rising demand from customers.
“This investment gives us the platform to scale-up significantly and we can now offer a much broader portfolio of solutions, creating new value for our customers in the UK and globally. We have never been better placed to deliver solutions to support the energy transition.”
Ailsa Young, Investment Director, Scottish National Investment Bank said: “Innovatium’s novel, patented technology is highly scalable and has the potential to significantly reduce industrial carbon emissions across a range of energy-intensive industries, including data centres where the rapid acceleration of AI has caused environmental concern.
“We were attracted to Innovatium’s potential to be a driver of Scotland’s net-zero economy, and we are pleased to be investing alongside Hitachi Industrial Equipment Systems, which will also support the commercial rollout of PRISMA.”
Europe is the world’s leader for LAES technology, as it is mainly being developed by four companies (namely Highview Power Storage in cooperation with GE Nuovo Pignone and Mitsubishi Hitachi Power Systems of Japan in cooperation with the Linde Group) located in the UK, Germany and Italy.
Research into this field of cold energy storage has been going on in Birmingham at the Birmingham University Centre for Cryogenic Energy Storage (BCCES) where a facility on the campus is connected to the university’s electrical grid, providing power to the campus.
The main components the liquefaction unit, compressors for the unit, low pressure, insulated liquefied air tank, an evaporation unit, air expander. There is then the option of a gas turbine, cold and heat storage units.
LAES systems can be located near demand centres (or wherever it is required) and the technology has one of the lowest levelised costs of energy.