Noon Energy

Noon Energy is pioneering a flow battery technology that enables economical long-duration energy storage. Our design will allow intermittent renewable electricity sources, such as solar and wind, to meet continual demand.

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Christopher Graves
Christopher Graves

Chris Graves has focused on sustainable energy and materials since 2004. After receiving his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2010 on the topic of storing renewable electricity by converting CO2 and H2O into hydrocarbon fuels with high temperature electrolysis cells, he continued electrochemistry research at the Technical University of Denmark, most recently as a senior scientist. Graves has led projects on novel electrochemical energy storage technologies, from new materials to modeling and characterization of cells to design and techno-economic analysis of systems. He has collaborated with NASA and was a visiting scholar at Stanford University on related electrochemical materials and devices.

In 2012 he invented a new type of rechargeable flow battery. After extensive lab-scale proof-of-concept research, he founded Noon Energy in 2018 to further develop and commercialize this breakthrough technology.

TECHNOLOGY
Critical Need
Solar and wind power are growing rapidly and dominating new electricity generation globally. New low-cost energy storage technologies are urgently needed to balance these intermittent renewables. Available storage systems are inadequate: conventional batteries and electrolytic hydrogen are too expensive and pumped hydro and compressed air are geographically constrained.

Unlike lithium-ion batteries, flow batteries and reversible electrolyzers decouple energy capacity and power capacity, which means the cost of storage decreases with increasing storage duration. However, these flow systems suffer from expensive storage media (vanadium) or low roundtrip energy efficiency (power-to-gas and back), and complex balance-of-system for flow management. All of these factors have kept long-duration storage for grid-scale renewable energy out of reach.

Technology Vision
Noon Energy's battery can match the energy efficiency of lithium-ion technology while using ultra-low-cost storage, enabling system-level costs of less than $50 per kWh capacity for hours or days of storage time.

Whereas existing batteries store energy in relatively expensive metals like vanadium, cobalt, and lithium, our battery stores energy in ultra-low-cost elements like hydrogen, carbon and oxygenstorage media that cost well below $1 per kWh capacity.

The clear target is long-duration storage coupled to intermittent solar and wind power to provide dispatchable electricity, a market which is growing quickly due to increasing deployment and falling costs of these clean energy sources.

Potential for Impact
Long-duration, economical energy storage will make a major contribution to revolutionizing the energy sector and integrating rapidly growing solar and wind renewable electricity supplies, beginning with stationary storage. In addition, the high energy density of the Noon Energy battery opens the door to transportation applications such as electric vehicles and aircraft. Low-cost storage would reduce energy imports, pollution, and emissions.

Noon is Looking for...

Technical collaborators
Funders
Joint development partners
Team members - engineers, interns