The 2025 Technology Innovation Award was jointly presented to ODQA, a University of Oxford spin-off, together with KTH Royal Institute of Technology, for their pioneering work advancing high-temperature air-based industrial heat.
ODQA’s rotary receiver generates air at above 1000 °C, adapting principles from gas turbine engineering, while KTH’s radial packed-bed thermal energy storage efficiently stores and releases this heat on demand, reducing pressure drops by over 50% and system costs by 60%. KTH’s research turned these concepts from laboratory experiments into proven prototypes, leading successful integration and testing with ODQA’s rotary air receiver, thus making flexible, cost-effective industrial-scale solar heat. Proven at pilot scale with industrial hot air applications, their integrated system is advancing through demonstration at PSA, offering a scalable path to decarbonize high-temperature industries with renewable solar heat.