The UK company RheEnergise has become an EIC winner thanks to its revolutionary HD Hydro® solution: long-duration energy storage for Europe and the world.
Bringing long-duration energy storage (LDES) to market is a major necessity to realizing a net-zero carbon future. Renewable energy generation is surging at an unprecedented pace, frequently competing with and even undercutting fossil fuel costs. However, supply is inherently intermittent, and grid balancing with LDES is essential.
RheEnergise has developed a technology solution that leverages their proprietary High-Density Fluid (HDF) in a pumped storage system, bringing scalable pumped hydro for the energy transition.
We feel very proud at Strata to have supported them in the EIC application. Congratulations to the team!
When was RheEnergise founded and what was the main motivation behind it?
RheEnergise was founded in 2019 based on a successful UK-funded project developing their core technology.
“My co-founders and I have been working together for more than 20 years in the clean tech space, with a focus on energy storage. We recognised the scale of the challenge: we are going to need enormous amounts of energy storage to complete the energy transition, and there are no existing solutions that can scale to the sheer volumes needed. We won’t be able to meet global climate goals if society doesn’t find better solutions for energy storage”.
“And that was our mission: find a scalable solution for long-duration energy storage that can enable intermittent wind and solar at large scales”- said Tamás.
What has been the most challenging part within your industry and how did you transform it into an opportunity?
Currently, the biggest energy storage technology is conventional pumped hydro storage, where water is pumped up a mountain, and energy is stored in the form of gravitational potential energy. However, it is very limited in terms of logistics, as there are only very few places where you can build it.
“You need a mountain. And then you need to have a river or water course along the bottom. And inevitably, the few places where there are mountains are not really where you want to be building large energy storage projects: they are beautiful mountains, and they’re not near the transmission lines. That’s really the fundamental thing that we realized was causing this bottleneck”.
“Thus, the biggest thing we did was to replace water with a high-density fluid. And the high-density fluid is two and a half times, so 250% the density of water. And that’s very significant because all else being equal, it means that a high-density hydro project can be built on a hill instead of a mountain. Our innovation does not cost hundreds of millions of euros or tens of millions of euros; and it doesn’t take 15 to 20 years to build. It takes three years to build”.
“We’ve got a simple idea, and we’ve worked through a lot of technological uncertainties”- added Tamás.
What are your most promising projects right now?
Our next big milestone is to deliver the first commercial project to a customer – what we call the first-of-a-kind project – and set ourselves the goal of delivering that by the end of 2028”- said Tamás.
How would you describe your experience with the EIC Accelerator?
“The EIC Accelerator grant was perfect for where we were and when we applied, because it was specifically to target this gap between a successful demonstrator and commercialization. It’s a very unique grant, I’ve never seen a grant quite like this”.
“So I think one of the first things we did with the guidance of the team at Strata was to identify a specific project within the overall commercialization journey. Then we articulated that and put it into the grant application, and the results speak for themselves: we won that grant, which is huge”.
“We had lots of people calling us asking for help. ‘What did you do? We’ve applied for this grant five times, and we’ve not won it. What did you guys do?’ And I always tell them, ‘well, we had very good partners with Strata!’”
“This grant is all about commercialization, so it’s all very well focused. It suits companies that are in this stage really well: it helps our cash flow, it helps with the program and so on. But have no doubt: it’s a very big commitment to apply for it and a lot of work”- explained Tamás.
How was your collaboration with the Strata Team?
“There’s a lot of opacity the first time you see [the grant], you’re like, ‘what is this?’, ‘What do they ask?’, ‘What do they really want?’ But being able to have someone there who’s done this before and says, ‘well, these are important.’ ‘This is important. ’ ‘Say this.’ ‘Do not say this.’ I think it was very helpful”.
“I really appreciated a bunch of things: One, the experience from Strata, which was incredibly valuable and signposted where to go. Another thing not to be underestimated that I really appreciated was the organization that Strata brings: startups are chaotic, they always are, so that scheduling and the organizational part of things were extremely valuable too. We had lots of guidance from Strata on how to make that fit, and they reviewed that and the letters of intent. We had many sessions with the consultants to practice the pitch, to review the Q&A, and we felt very well prepared for the interview”- concluded Tamás.
