South Australia’s Latent Heat Storage has received $400,000 in funding under the Commonwealth Government’s Accelerating Commercialisation programme to help launch its sand-based thermal energy storage system onto the international market. The company’s shareholders will match the grant dollar-for-dollar.

Latent Heat Storage has patented a low cost and highly scalable thermal energy storage system based on the latent heat properties of silicon derived from sand.

The technology has been developed over three years in partnership with the Adelaide engineering consultancy ammjohn and the University of Adelaide, where final year engineering students have incorporated work on the project into postgraduate degrees.

It’s system differs from many competing technologies because of the extent of its scalability – from small scale 500 kilowatt applications to large scale applications of hundreds of megawatts. The system can be integrated anywhere within an electricity network and is particularly suitable for commercial and industrial businesses, such as hotels, hospitals, schools and aged care facilities. where both heat and electricity are required.