Technology

The Basics

Like a battery, Photon Vault's technology operates like a bank for energy. It can store cheap and plentiful energy and discharge it when it is needed and is more valuable. Where batteries store electricity, the Photon Vault stores heat energy. This heat energy can be harvested from various sources. Solar thermal power and industrial waste heat are our initial two solutions, but our systems can ingest heat from any source that is hot enough. Our innovation includes both our process for generating the heat energy and our proprietary energy storage media in which the heat is banked. Both are patented, with other patents pending.

Energy Storage

The Photon Vault stores heat in a bank built from a custom-engineered composite material. The material includes no exotic or rare materials and existing supply chains for all materials are geographically dispersed and well-supplied. This material is more efficient than other storage media and does not degrade from cycle to cycle, as batteries do. To discharge the stored energy, we turn our temperature gradient into a pressure gradient that turns a standard generator. This is comparable to running a refrigerator backwards: instead of converting electricity into a temperature gradient, we convert a temperature gradient into electricity. This has the great advantage that every component in our system other than our proprietary storage media and our solar heat collector is an off-the-shelf technology that is well-understood and well-supplied via existing supply chains. The fact that our only input is a temperature gradient means that our system is very elegant and resilient.