Our talk with Guido Dalessi, CEO and one of Elestor‘s early investors, is squeezed in between two important performances. At an online conference in London, he tells the world about the importance of flow batteries for energy storage. Half a day later, there is a similar request from the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs. Energy storage is hot, that much is clear. “Everyone is now aware that the energy transition will never succeed without the option of storage,” says Dalessi. “Now it’s high time for the government to prepare the market for this development.”
From all the different active materials that could theoretically be used to design a flow battery, Elestor selected hydrogen and bromine. This leads to a number of advantages, says Dalessi: “The choice of hydrogen and bromine is purely motivated by Elestor’s mission to build a storage system with the lowest possible storage costs per kWh. Hydrogen and bromine are available in abundance worldwide. Delivery can, therefore, not be dominated by a small group of suppliers – unlike lithium, cobalt, and vanadium.”
The company, which is located at Industriepark Kleefse Waard in Arnhem, now employs 24 people of eight different nationalities. They are mainly scientists and engineers from the chemical and mechanical engineering fields. For its efforts, the company has already received many awards, such as last year’s Pearl Award. Dalessi looks back on it with great pleasure. “It’s not that you can directly measure what such an award does to your company, but this award is especially dear to me because it didn’t need to be preceded by a pitch or anything like that. It came entirely from The Economic Board’s appreciation of us, not influenced by the pitching qualities of someone from Elestor.”
But it doesn’t stop at eternal fame, there was also appreciation in terms of money. Last year, Koolen Industries (from owner Kees Koolen, former CEO of booking.com and early investor in Uber) joined EIT InnoEnergy, Enfuro, and Dalessi BV as investors. Since then, the company got the space to expand the team and build the first systems on a real scale. A few of these are still in the pipeline before entering the commercialization phase.
Does that mean that the step to the market is getting closer?
“Market interest has actually been there from the start, and it’s only growing. We are now talking to a few large companies and expect to be able to close a major deal soon. But before that happens, we will have to prove that our systems are stable. That requires testing, a lot of testing. After all, you don’t know what you’ve built until the endurance tests have been completed. The first 6 of 22 test stations to be built run 24/7 to test the lifespan of 10 to 15,000 cycles and all kinds of other properties. With this, we test the heart of the system, the membrane stacks. We invested heavily in these test facilities in 2020, because only in this way do we know what we really built and can we give the market performance guarantees. The tests also speed up the optimization process.”
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