IceBrick virtual power plant gets $306m loan guarantee
Image courtesy Nostromo Energy
The US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Loan Programs Office has granted a loan guarantee of up to $305.54 million to finance Project IceBrick, a virtual power plant (VPP) consisting of up to 193 cold thermal energy storage installations at commercial buildings across California.
The loan falls under a conditional commitment to IceBrick Energy Assets I, a subsidiary of Nostromo Energy, an Isreal-based tech company that provides energy storage systems based on ice.
At full scale, the project could provide the equivalent of approximately 170MW/450MWh of behind-the-meter storage capacity for hotels, offices, data centres and other commercial buildings.
Nostromo Energy submitted its loan application to the office in Summer 2022. If finalised, Project IceBrick would provide customers with efficiency as a service by freezing a water-based solution during hours when electricity supply is at its most abundant and clean.
The IceBrick system would then store and later use the ice to support cooling of the building during hours of peak demand, when the power grid faces highest demand and electricity production is most expensive.
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Nostromo’s Cirrus software platform allows the IceBrick systems to operate as a VPP by orchestrating multiple energy assets to function in concert with one other or participating as individual assets. The flexibility of this load shift technology provides power capacity for resilience and serves as a load stabilising complement to intermittent clean energy assets.
Specifically, by shifting commercial cooling loads away from times of peak usage, when electricity is at its most carbon-intensive, Nostromo’s IceBrick systems would allow California’s bulk power system to avoid up to 500,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions over the project’s lifetime.
As a VPP, the project also supports a higher rate of grid asset utilisation, hoping to temper cost increases in California, a state that faces some of the highest electricity bills in the nation.
With Project IceBrick, Nostromo will also share with customers a portion of the expected cost savings attributable to this aggregate shift in building cooling load and plans to earn additional revenue by having the VPP participate in wholesale energy and capacity markets.
According to Nostromo, the individual IceBrick thermal storage cells are modular and compact, allowing for installation in a variety of building types as well as locations within a building, such as in a basement or on a roof.
The thermal storage cells will be manufactured for the project (and future US installations) entirely in the US by contractors located in three states, Texas, Iowa, and California.
Project IceBrick represents the third VPP project the DOE has announced and the first to use cold thermal energy storage.
The loan guarantee, if finalised, will be offered through the Innovation Energy category of the Title 17 Clean Energy Financing Program, which includes financing opportunities for projects that deploy new or significantly improved high-impact clean energy technologies.
While this conditional commitment indicates DOE’s intent to finance the project, DOE must complete an environmental review and the company must satisfy certain technical, legal, environmental, commercial and financial conditions before a decision on entering into definitive financing documents and funding the loan guarantee.
