ELESTOR: The Missing Link in Clean Energy Systems

Climate change and rising global temperatures continue as the major threat to humanity, and the energy transition is just one solution to a wider problem. For Wiebrand Kout, Founder and CTO at Elestor – the Dutch flow battery business – this obvious challenge has been in the pipeline for decades and, as we live in the eye of the storm in the fight against climate change, he is taking action.

On February 24, research from the University of New South Wales was published stating that global heating has shifted double the amount of fresh water away from warm regions towards the earth’s poles. The result? Hotter and drier regions, already home to millions, will experience further drought and extreme rainfall events.

Decarbonisation and movement away from strategic reliance on fossil fuels is critical but without reliable systems it will take longer than the time we have available to achieve. This is why Kout and team have developed a novel flow battery system that can connect seamlessly into renewable energy systems to provide storage of this valuable electrical power.

Using a bromine and hydrogen chemical reaction within a membrane stack, flow batteries can produce mass capacity and mass output, with little or no degradation. Both bromine and hydrogen are abundant elements and are freely available around the world meaning that supply is not limited to a small number of companies. Using these elements as opposed to lithium, cobalt or vanadium results in the cheapest possible storage costs. Additionally, nothing goes in or out apart from electricity ensuring environmental and safety credentials.

While this concept is not entirely new, the way the system is designed is Elestor’s USP, and comes from Kout’s many years in the renewable energy industry.

“I designed and built my first hydrogen fuel cell in 1999 as a thesis project. I joined a start up company developing proton-exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cells and that was 23 years ago. Already, at that time, it was clear to me that our civilisation needed to change its energy technology very fast,” he tells Energy Focus.

“From those days with fuels cells, I moved to another company, developing hydrogen compressors for hydrogen energy systems – it was very innovative technology without any moving parts, very fascinating, but it was a niche market.”

By 2012, he had witnessed progress in the solar and wind energy space, with prices becoming more attractive with each development. “However, both are predictably unpredictable and I realised that the really huge economic opportunity was going to be in balancing electricity storage,” he says.

GENESIS

As Chinese manufacturing of solar panels became more intense post 2010, European companies were very quickly pushed out of the market, unable to compete based on quality alone. Chinese companies had state backing and quickly dominated the market “This was the genesis of Elestor,” says Kout, explaining that the philosophy behind the company has always been storage solutions at the lowest possible cost.

Initially slugging away with Elestor as a weekend and evening project, Kout was clear in his mission and understood that if the company was to scale it would have to be certain about its product should it get into any form of price battle.

“It was very simple: What is the lowest cost way of storing electricity for long duration at large scale,” he remembers.

Firstly, it was clear that electrochemical technology was key for scale. At the time, Kout knew that bromine and hydrogen made sense because of their availability but a chance meeting with Dr Adam Weber, an American scientist, confirmed the ideas. “Looking at his work, I immediately recognised the potential for the technology because electrochemically it is wonderful, gaining a lot of power from a square meter of cell area with very low cost materials.

Of course, there were challenges. The process of developing the concept was not instant. “This is a not a technology for beginners,” smiles Kout, highlighting difficulties in perfecting the membrane stack as primary hurdles.

“I had the advantage of more than 15 years’ experience in the industry and that is what made it possible for me to come up with solutions to the tough problems,” he recalls.

But, gaining traction, Elestor was still a one man ambition, worked in spare time. In 2013, this situation changed following yet another productive chance meeting.

“I got in contact with an organisation called EIT InnoEnergy and their goal is to help entrepreneurs in clean energy. I started negotiations and they were happy to seed the funds for Elestor, provided that I quit my day job.

“This was a good deal and I took the jump in June 2014. I started experimenting with some students and we quickly got the cell technology working. This was the first time in Europe that we got a hydrogen bromine cell,” details Kout.

After initial success, the new entrepreneur realised that his strengths came in the R&D side of the organisation, with much innovation being injected into every new line of thought. To take the next steps, he needed a business mind to assist. He returned to EIT InnoEnergy and was paired with Guido Dalessi, an experienced and successful technology business leader.

“Guido came onboard as CEO and as investor, spending 2015 looking for venture capitalists, which we secured by the end of that year. That funding allowed us to grow the team, build prototypes, and show that the technology was real, workable, and safe,” says Kout.

In 2019, Elestor took another significant stride, onboarding Kees Koolen – former booking.com CEO and clean energy financier – as a lead investor. This helped boost the Elestor brand and allowed the company to build a suitable test lab and pilot production systems at container scale which were key in convincing Vopak to place the first proper order.

TESTING 24/7

Vopak is the world’s leading independent tank storage company, storing vital products, including oil, chemicals and gas, with care. By investing in Elestor flow batteries, the company will soon be able to boast a new range in its impressive history of storage excellence.

“We have already started,” says Kout when asked about the progress with Vopak. “We have systems at our pilot field behind our building in Arnhem which we are testing 24/7. Vopak has a long-term view and including long duration energy storage makes perfect sense for them. They have an excellent track record when it comes to safety and they are very careful, and that makes them a great partner to work with. We have learned a lot from their approach. The first installation at a Vopak terminal will be done once testing at our pilot field has been completed.”

A perfect client for Elestor, this arrangement sees Kout’s ambition to disrupt strategic reliance on fossil fuels coming to fruition.

“Everything I felt was coming in 2013 came to pass,” he says. “Frankly, it happened faster than I had imagined – both the good and the bad. Now, we have solar energy available for €20 per megawatt hour, very low cost. Offshore wind energy is also going in that direction and it is amazing how fast the cost reductions have been achieved – some amazing engineering there, and it has shown that economies of scale are real.”

At the same time, the pace of climate change has accelerated. All the warning signs of 2013, says Kout, are now a reality. He highlights the Netherlands specifically as a nation with worry, sitting up to six meters below sea level. “We will be the first in the European Union to feel it and it is very dangerous. I still feel there is insufficient awareness of how risky this situation is.

“When I started my career, I could not understand why the civilised world wanted to make itself so dependent on fossil energy. The situation continues to this day and after February 24 it became especially painful.”

These new realities drive innovation and change, and with solar and wind power removing reliance on fossil fuel burning energy systems, the final problem to solve is storage – the Elestor intervention.

BANG FOR BUCK

Balancing supply is the key to unlocking universal rollout of renewable energy. In Europe in 2020, green solar and wind energy accounted for almost 20% of total supply but it is the rapid growth expected across these disciplines that excites campaigners going forward. With Elestor’s flow batteries well equipped to store this electricity, scaling is the focus.

Hylke van Bennekom, COO, is keen for the company to build a manufacturing plant large enough to rival today’s lithium battery factories to ensure mass rollout of technology at pace. And Kout is keen on the idea, fully aware that Elestor technology can assist in the energy transition.

“We are running out of time and this has to be done very quickly. The nice thing about our technology is that the investment needed in production capacity, for a given storage capacity, is much lower. You can leverage a lot of the technology made for PEM fuel cells – it is all available technology and can be applied to flow batteries,” he says.

Earlier in the development process, the company had to address the storage capacity issue. Elestor started out measuring the lifecycle of its cells in hours but the whole idea was about scalable size, so this had to be improved. Today, the company is designing systems with hundreds of kilowatts and megawatt hours of capacity.

“We had to learn a lot about all of the materials and we have progressed a lot. We have cells in our lab which have been switched on for thousands of hours doing nothing but charging and discharging constantly and we can’t measure any degradation – that is something that I am really proud of,” says Kout.

“Scaling up to gigawatt hour capacity gives more bang for the buck with the Elestor flow battery than you get with lithium.”

Perfecting the technology, always with the goal of low cost but high capacity, is where much of the current focus sits as Elestor bolsters its team with new people to bring fresh ideas as it quickly moves into a new phase in its life.

“Having achieved something wonderful in the lab is different to bringing the product to market. There are now different challenges – scaling, part quality, reliability, and engineering. We don’t want to lose the cost advantage that we get from the materials through inefficient project engineering,” details Kout.

FUNDING, PEOPLE, PRICING

For Elestor to achieve its milestones, Dalessi and Kout highlight two key requirements for the near future: Funding and people. “Both are prerequisites and it is looking good for both,” confirms Kout.

Following the appointment of Hylke van Bennekom as COO in 2021 through an MBI, the company’s people agenda is also advancing nicely.

Today, Elestor is about to embark on an ultra-rapid growth path, fuelled by multi-million Euro investments, as well as by agreements with clients strategically adopting its innovative storage technology.

“The atmosphere here is exciting and the people are driven to be a part of a solution. We give a lot of freedom to people to develop their own ideas, in which they get forgiveness rather than permission, and that creates a positive and exciting atmosphere. Having said that, there is of course time pressure, and we all know that we must perform and we have to meet our milestones,” Kout says of an Elestor which is now a long way from his part-time concept of 2013.

“It has been a different Elestor every six months. Some of the people have been with us since the beginning and they have also seen fast development, starting as students but now leading teams and large projects while writing a lot of scientific literature. One of the researchers at Elestor completed his PhD promotion at the Eindhoven University of Technology at Elestor, and a second one is halfway in combination with their jobs at Elestor.”

Thankfully, the company’s desire to provide the missing link is as strong as ever as its internal obsession with the costs of storage will never diminish.

“The price pressure on storage is never going to disappear,” admits Kout. “Wind, solar storage will make fossil fuel generation obsolete – look at what is happening now with insane natural gas prices on a per megawatt hour basis. Wind, solar storage is definitely the future of the energy system. But, even after the day when the last fossil fuel plant closes down, the price pressure is not going to disappear.”

Is he worried about this pressure, especially with competitors ever-present? “It is the reason we founded the company – to reduce the cost of electricity storage to the absolute minimum so it would be strange to say I’m not worried about the competition.”

However, the opportunities in the energy transition, that exist now and in the near future, make for an open playing field, and Elestor is leading the race.

“There are investors and large companies with a clear vision of the future, who also see that we will move towards wind, solar and storage with hydrogen also in the mix. Our storage technology fits perfectly with all of that,” smiles Kout. “The unique integration of our technology with hydrogen infrastructures and electrolysers unlocks several new opportunities. As such, the Elestor technology bridges the two worlds of energy storage: with batteries and in the form of hydrogen.”

In a wave of negative news around climate change and the resultant natural phenomenon that we already see, Elestor’s story is a spark of confidence that new energy systems can work effectively.

“Eight years go very quickly but we are now in a strong position with a well-developed electrochemical technology, quality designs, safety knowhow, and everything in place for scaling, as well as signed agreements with leading global players adopting our technology,” Kout concludes.