Power Plant That Can Both Generate And Store Energy

“Our plants can be thought of as power plants and chemical plants rolled into one very thermally efficient system,” says Vijay Prateik, Founder and CEO, deMITasse Energies

deMITasse Energies is an IIM Bangalore incubated startup in the clean-energy and energy-storage business. The company is working with some Indian energy companies and is also doing projects with the Indian Navy and the Indian Army. The Delhi based startup has offices in Bengaluru, Delhi, and New Jersey. The company has created a new type of power plant which is reliable, low-cost, and uses a zero-emission technology. It can both generate and store electricity with high efficiency.

deMITasse’s power plant works on a fundamentally similar principle as a thermal power plant that generates electricity by moving a turbine using steam. But unlike a regular thermal plant, the company’s plant uses a different type of working fluid to power a different type of thermodynamic cycle, which offers better efficiency and has better pressure and temperature characteristics than water.

Vijay Prateik, the Founder and CEO, says, “Our plants utilise available external energy sources like waste heat from industries, solar thermal, off-peak electricity, etc to capture energy within our proprietary working fluid. This captured energy can be converted into usable power by passing this energy-rich (high-pressure, high-temperature) working fluid through a turbogenerator.”

The secret sauce of the company’s power plant is the process of re-liquefying the working fluid after it has been used for moving the turbogenerator. deMITasse Energies’ power plant utilises complex chemical and catalytic processes to liquefy the working fluid, thus getting rid of the energy-inefficient components like condensers and compressors used in the existing thermal plants and making it an energy-efficient process.

Thanks to their “highly energetic” chemicals and catalysts their power plant can also double as an energy storage system, when the energy demand is low, or can be used in conjunction with solar farms for storing energy. Prateik says, “The round-trip efficiency of our plant is about 70-85% as compared to about 30-36% of thermal power plants, 38-40% of advanced super-critical power plants, and about 5-10% of ORC plants.”

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