Malta Inc stores electricity as heat in molten salt and cold in antifreeze for days or weeks, enabling long-duration grid storage from cheap renewable energy.
Malta Inc is a long-duration energy storage company founded in 2018 and backed by Alphabet's X development lab and Breakthrough Energy Ventures. The company develops a grid-scale electrothermal energy storage system that converts excess electricity into heat stored in molten salt and cold stored in antifreeze, then converts the temperature differential back to electricity using a heat engine when needed. Unlike lithium-ion batteries that are limited to four to six hours of storage, Malta's system can store energy economically for dozens of hours, potentially enabling renewable energy to serve demand across multi-day weather events. The technology uses standard industrial components including heat exchangers and turbines at commodity prices, aiming for lower capital cost than electrochemical alternatives at long durations. Malta is developing commercial demonstration projects to validate system performance at grid scale. The company represents the electrothermal approach to long-duration storage, competing with iron-air batteries, flow batteries, and compressed air storage for the multi-hour to multi-day storage market that lithium-ion cannot economically address.
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