“When you look at electricity production, you realize renewable energy has already arrived,” Yonadav Buber tells ISRAEL21c.
“The cost of renewable energy production is already competing with that of coal and natural gas. The only reason we haven’t yet become dependent on renewable energy is that it works whenever it wants – you can’t turn on the sun at night or make the wind blow.”
There are lots of companies examining ways to store renewable energy to make it more available. “But I always think that the simplest solution is also the best one,” Buber says.
And as the CEO of Israeli energy storage startup BaroMar, Buber believes his company has reached such a solution – storing renewable energy underwater, right on the seabed.
One simple, low-tech solution, he notes, is compressing air inside a tank and then releasing it to create electricity. Such high pressure requires either very big, strong tanks, or geological formations such as former natural gas reservoirs that have been emptied of gas. Neither option is widely available.
What is more commonly available, he says, is the sea.
Deep in the sea, where the pressure levels are high, tanks storing high-pressure compressed air don’t need to be particularly strong or big because pressure levels aren’t so different in and out of the tank. This fact stands at the heart of the solution BaroMar is now developing.
“This is a really genius solution, because it circumvents the problem in a very elegant way. It also creates the possibility of more or less endless energy storage, because we’re talking about the seabed, which is not exactly hot real estate,” Buber says.
Keep reading at israel21c.org.
BaroMar is an energy storage startup. BaroMar CTO Sergio Koren is a Technion alumnus.
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