The "good", the "bad" and the "interesting..."
The "good"
The "good"
The "good"
The Nuragloo energy system is designed around a few guiding principles in order to tackle what appear to be the main barriers for mass adoption of energy storage systems.
- Our analyis of the landscape has given us a strong belief that cost of deployement is the first and most pressing issue for most stakeholders. We are clearly not offering free candy, but a Nuragloo system has extremely lower CAPEX and OPEX than any competitor.
- While at times greatly exaggerated, it is a fact that BESS systems (Li-ion family specifically) have some safety issues in case of fire or mismanagement. It would be unfair to not recognize that a great deal of effort from competitors has gone into addressing the issue, but it should not be a surprise to learn that such safety issues play a role when it comes to deciding whether or not to acquire an energy storage asset.
- Nuragloo has a considerable advantage when it comes to safety, primarily due to the nature of the technology it relies on and its design.
The "bad"
The "good"
The "good"
Nuragloo is in no way a silver bullet, but that's okay from where we stand, because there is no such thing as a silver bullet when it comes to energy storage.
- The technology on which we rely, while impressive on several fronts, presents us with some constraints and limits: the most relevant of these is the scale that is required for the system to be effective - we have miniaturized existing LAES to the extreme with Nuragloo, trying to shrink it further, in our view would be counterproductive
- This means that we do not see the asset becoming an appliance for a single household, but on the other hand, if you and 4 or 5 neighbours got your hands on one of our toys, you might be quite happy about it
- A Nuragloo looks weird and it has a stupid name. However, its weird outer look is the key to the remarkable performance, versatility, resilience and at the end of the day, we hail from Sardinia, where we have some 8000 Nuraghi and we needed to place the air inlet as far high as possible, so we thought "fuck it, let's make it in the shape of a Nuraghe".
The "interesting..."
Those few guiding principles we mentioned above can be summed up under the broad category of "The Energy Storage Problem and how to fix it".
Looking a bit deeper into the matter, the "Problem" is not as much with "Energy Storage" per se, but rather to the uneven pace of adoption of renewable generation assets and energy storage assets.
Such imbalance is derived by the limits that the two most established techs (pumped hydro and BESS) have, the first of which being, in our opinion, their inability to scale up or down efficiently.
Pumped hydro is the best when it comes to large scale, long duration energy storage demand, but it is slow in its response and it has to be HUGE to be cost effective, which in turn means that certain geographical conditions are necessary to build one (also, don't get me started on the gigantic pain in the ass that red tape is for a project of this size).
BESS assets are almost at the complete opposite end of the spectrum, with fast response, and the ability to be scaled down to the point that they can be sized for a single household, however they are usually most effective when bridging small gaps in energy generation with only a few hours of storage capacity and - due to the complexities of the supply chain of the materials a battery is made of - have still fairly high costs which makes them unaffordable for the vast majority of households.
We may be wrong, but we read both these instances as ineffective market penetration, issue which could be solved with an asset that could get almost as small a BESS and almost as big as a pumped-hydro plant.
Nuragloo is the first step in this direction, and once again, it all goes back to its design and the technology on which it relies.
As mentioned above, our system is unlikely to be fit for single households, which is why it is targeted and sized specifically for stakeholders with both higher energy storage demands and great interest in the adoption of an asset (i.e. fast return on investment), which of course means businesses with high energy demands being our primary user base
A Nuragloo can be deployed virtually anywhere, which implies that they could be placed nearby the final users but as well in the relatively remote locations where usually renewable generation takes place, in order to balance the output and reduce the stress placed on the energy transport infrastructure in case of overgeneration.
Addressing the ease of deployement of a Nuragloo unit, this is achieved thanks to two features of the system, namely:
- extremely reduced land use: the unusual shape of Nuragloo makes it a mostly vertical structure
- being built with over 85% off the shelf and stand components, which are readily available anywhere, supply chain is not an issue.
We feel like it is worth mentioning that when we say "off the shelf components", we really mean "off the shelf" as in standardized and readily available in most large hardware stores, which has a net positive impact on both supply chain issues and cost cutting.