Bill Gates founded Breakthrough Energy Ventures and served as its chairman.



Antora Energy, a thermal storage startup, raised $50 million from investment companies such as Breakthrough Energy Ventures at Bill Gates to accelerate the development of its thermal based carbon block energy storage system for heavy industry.



This investment is provided by Breakthrough, Lowercarbon Capital, Shell Ventures, BHP Ventures, Grok Ventures, Trust Ventures, Overture VC, Impact Science Ventures, and existing investor Fifth Years VC.



Antona stated that this funding was obtained after a $5 million grant from US government agencies in 2020, which will help the company "establish their first customer positioning project and accelerate recruitment speed.".



The technology of this California based company works by absorbing the electricity from wind and solar energy into carbon blocks. These are heated to up to 2000 ° C.



The company claims that these heated carbon blocks can provide heat by heating pipes containing steam or hot air, or they can even generate electricity by directing their glow to modified solar photovoltaic modules. Antora stated that these two discharge modes operate completely independently.



In a recent article by Medium, CEO Andrew Ponec wrote that with its affordability, simplicity, and infinite scalability, thermal energy outperforms all other storage types it saw in its early stages - hydrogen, batteries, gravity storage, compressed air, and flywheels.



He claims that carbon blocks are one of the cheapest storage materials in the world, and the company has a "world record breaking solid-state heat engine that only requires a few micrometers of material and no moving parts to convert radiant heat into electrical energy," solving the two main problems of heat storage. He also believes that carbon blocks have the same energy density as lithium-ion batteries.



Ponec stated in an interview in January that Antora has a main prototype system of several hundred kilowatt hours, but is "working" to provide a 100 MWh pilot system for Wellhead Electric, a natural gas, solar, and energy storage factory developer in California.



The company's goal is heavy industry, which is a 30% single largest carbon emission source and has found it difficult to decarbonize due to high heat and electricity demand. One example is steel production, which requires a temperature of approximately 1500 ° C.



"Our investors see this and see an opportunity of $1 trillion per year. We look at it and see an opportunity to reduce carbon emissions by 10 trillion tons per year," he said.



According to media reports, this round of financing is the largest in the field since EnergyNest raised 110 million euros (130 million US dollars) for its concrete based technology in April last year.



In fact, emerging thermal energy storage spaces include various materials, and the solution is based on these materials. American startup Malta Inc uses a molten salt based storage solution, Swedish group Azelio's is based on aluminum, while Scottish based Sunamp uses phase change materials (PCM) as its proprietary technology, a low-temperature storage technology primarily targeted at the residential hot water heating market.



As a suitable technology route for long-term energy storage, thermal storage is constantly gaining more attention and market opportunities with the explosive demand for long-term energy storage.



Among the first members of the Global Long Term Energy Storage Council, Azelio, Echogen Power, Malta, and Stiesdal are thermal energy storage companies.

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