Standard Thermal: Energy Storage 500x Cheaper Than Batteries

Summary

The Quick Summary Standard Thermal is the company I've been leading for the last ~2 years. The purpose of Standard Thermal is to make energy from solar PV available 24/7/365 at a price that is competitive with US natural gas. Our technology works by storing energy as heat in the least expensive storage material available - large piles of dirt. Co-located solar PV arrays provide energy (as electricity) and are simpler and cheaper than grid-connected solar farms. Electric heating elements embedded in the dirt piles convert electricity to heat. Pipes run through the pile, and fluid flowing through them removes heat to supply the customer. The capital cost, not including the solar PV, is comparable to natural gas storage at less than $0.10/kilowatt-hour thermal and 1000x cheaper than batteries. These are the customer archetypes we can save the most money for right now: Solar developers with oversized arrays greater than 300 kilowatts and heat demand at the location. Our system can store the summer excess production for winter thermal demand. Isolated energy users forced to use propane or fuel oil, typically using more than 50,000 gallons of propane per year. The storage system can provide hundreds of megawatts of thermal demand as long as land is available (you can check land usage using our estimator). The technology requires some scale to be cost-effective, hence the minimums. Our medium-term goal is to repower coal power plants to supply electricity during seasonal lows. Repowering means the stored heat creates steam on demand for the turbines instead of burning coal. We have been continuously prototyping designs at our 100-kilowatt test site in Oklahoma since last fall and are nearing our modular commercial form factor. It will be built and tested in the next several months, then it will be ready for copying and pasting at customer sites. Orca Sciences is incubating our company. We plan to spin out and close on fundraising early in 2026. Read on if you'd like to kno...