Sumitomo Heavy Industries, Ltd. (SHI) invested USD 46M in Highview Power Limited (Highview), U.K., leading the development of Liquid Air Energy Storage (LAES) technology globally, which is expected to play an important role in the electric power industries just around the corner, in order to acquire the energy storage technology.
LAES is a technology which stores energy in the form of liquefied air and discharges the stored energy as electricity when needed.
In order to spread the use of renewable energy, which is an important means of countermeasures against global warming, it is essential to eliminate the instability of its power supply. In addition, function to stabilize power grids including a lot of distributed renewable power sources is very important. LAES can play a major role in solving these issues.
SHI, together with Sumitomo SHI FW (SFW), a wholly-owned subsidiary of SHI, will promote cooperation with Highview and promote commercialization of energy storage system(CRYOBattery) using this LAES technology. SHI will contribute to the global spread of this technology in Europe and the United States, where demand is growing rapidly, and throughout Asia.