Antora Energy, a leader in zero-emissions industrial heat and power, has been selected by the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) to begin award negotiations for up to $14.5 million to accelerate the launch of Antora’s combined heat and power thermal battery product. Building on prior support from ARPA-E, this capital through the Seeding Critical Advances for Leading Energy technologies with Untapped Potential (SCALEUP) program unlocks commercial-scale manufacturing for Antora’s pioneering heat-to-power technology and paves the way for gigaton-scale decarbonization impact in the industrial sector.
Over the past five years, Antora, supported by ARPA-E, has transformed thermophotovoltaic (TPV) technology into a reliable, scalable, and simple solution to convert heat to electricity with no moving parts—a job historically handled by complex and costly turbomachinery. Antora has demonstrated breakthrough heat-to-electric conversion efficiency and opened the world’s first dedicated manufacturing line for TPV. These advances open a path to rapidly manufacture Antora’s combined heat and power product in U.S. manufacturing facilities with a U.S.-based supply chain.
As part of the SCALEUP award, Antora will work to ensure that its combined heat and power product fully addresses the needs of industrial and utility customers. Antora will partner with Con Edison, the utility that serves New York City and Westchester County, to help meet its ambitious clean heat and power goals for New Yorkers. In addition, Antora has signed a letter of intent with Shell to evaluate potential opportunities to deploy the product in industrial processes such as chemicals production.
“ARPA-E’s ongoing support has put Antora on a rapid path to electrify industry in the United States and beyond,” said Andrew Ponec, co-founder and CEO, Antora Energy. “By soaking up ultra-cheap renewable electricity, thermal batteries are already the lowest-cost way to deliver industrial heat. Turning that heat into cheap and reliable electricity requires a better heat engine than has ever existed, and that’s exactly what Antora has achieved with our heat-to-power TPV technology. This transformative funding from ARPA-E enables us to expand our TPV manufacturing capacity and accelerate the launch of Antora’s combined heat and power product.”
“Through an ARPA-E program focused on long duration energy storage to increase utilization of renewable generation assets, Antora Energy developed, manufactured, and tested a novel thermophotovoltaic cell with high efficiency for a thermal battery,” said ARPA-E Director Evelyn N. Wang. “Now, through SCALEUP, the company will ramp up its production, enabling the cost-effective production of solid-state heat engines to supply both high quality heat and power. I look forward to following Antora Energy’s progress as they work to decarbonize our American industrial sector.”
Antora leverages renewable electricity to heat blocks of solid carbon—a low-cost, earth-abundant, and safe storage medium that’s used extensively across industries—to glowing hot temperatures in an insulated battery module. The stored heat is then reliably delivered at the scale and temperatures that large industrial operations demand, or can be converted directly into electricity using Antora’s TPV technology—unlocking the dual heat and power output needed to completely replace the fossil fuels used in today’s manufacturing processes for sectors like food & beverage, paper products, chemicals, steel, and cement.
SOURCE: Businesswire