As global carbon emissions continue increase accelerating the frequency of severe climate catastrophes, Energy Vault founders set out to solve one of the greatest challenges facing our planet today – how to store renewable energy in both an economical and sustainable way to produce baseload power that will end the world’s reliance on fossil fuels.
Energy accounts for the largest sectorial contributor (72%) of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Fossil fuels (coal, oil, & natural gas) supply approximately 80% of the world’s energy. (Client Earth, 2020) Although we are beginning to see reduction in fossil fuel dependencies, renewables have struggled historically to fully replace fossil fuel power due to production unpredictability and intermittency from reliance on variable factors such as wind and sunlight. In the absence of more efficient and cost-effective storage, the amount of electricity that can be delivered to the grid from renewable energy source, though now widely affordable, has been limited.
Energy Vault founders sought to develop an energy storage solution that could be deployed quickly and at scale with proven technology (i.e., based on the fundamentals of Pumped Hydro Electric storage which is 95% of all Energy storage in the workd today) while leveraging significant innovation in material science and system design to enable a disruption in economics that allows substantial renewable energy to be delivered below the cost of fossil fuels for the first time.
www.clientearth.org. (2020). Fossil fuels and climate change: the facts. [online] Available at: https://www.clientearth.org/latest/latest-updates/stories/fossil-fuels-and-climate-change-the-facts/.
