Ambri is a Boston-area startup that is making molten salt batteries. A demonstration project to deploy energy storage for Microsoft data centers has been announced by the company.
The company claims its technology could be 50% cheaper than an equivalent system. A relatively low amount of energy that's used to charge the battery is lost to heat if the battery is molten salt.
Donald Sadoway worked in the lab at MIT. The company wanted to develop a low-cost product for the stationary storage market.
The inspiration came from something else. The team built a lab-scale, low-cost energy storage system using similar chemical reactions. It hasn't been easy to turn this idea into a product.
The chemistry the company started out with was hard to make. Ambri went back to the drawing board after it laid off 25% of its staff in 2015.
The company decided to use calcium and antimony in its batteries. Bradwell says the new chemistry should be simpler to make. The company has made progress on commercialization since the pivot and has signed its first deals, including one with Microsoft.
Major challenges remain for the startup. The high temperatures of the batteries limit what materials can be used. It can be difficult to move from single battery cells to huge container-sized systems.
It means dealing with real world things that happen when you deploy a product to the real world. A new battery system can be damaged by a variety of things.
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