Yes, we know our own Lloyd has great energy for unearthing greenwashing, but this is something else again. Only the names are the same. One of the hassles with renewables like solar, that sometimes it’s, well, dark. So how to store the good times for later? The Lloyd Energy Storage System, (pic here) is, in own words,”a breakthrough technology in that it provides energy storage from tens of kilowatts to hundreds of megawatts with applications varying from short duration standby generations to mainstream continuous power plants and almost all combinations in between.” The Lloyd system, developed in Australia, is a block of high purity graphite, which is said to accept heat in any form and can then store it for many days or even weeks, “depending on the rate of energy extraction to the rate of energy replacement.” The trick that Lloyd have on their side is apparently they’ve managed to figure out how to refine low grade graphite into high quality crystalline graphite. The storage capacity of which we’re told “ranges from around 300kWh (thermal) per tonne at a storage temperature of 750°C to around 1000kWh (thermal) per tonne at 1800°C.” Now, if this all sounds like it should be in the ‘too good to be true’ basket, well the Australian government announced (PDF) a couple of months ago that Lloyd Energy Systems were beneficaries of $5 million AUD in research funding, with plans to support a 16-tower solar array for a regional NSW centre. The proof of the pudding, as the proverb goes, will be in the tasting. ::Lloyd Energy Storage.

Thirsty for more? Check out these related articles:

• Let There Be Solar Panels...And There Were: Vatican Completes Rooftop Solar Array
• EWA Squeezes Water From Thin Air, Like In Old Biblical Times
• $9 Million Clean Tech Fund Launched in Connecticut
• 20MW Solar Tower Project: Just the Beginning

The All-Seeing Orb Says You Are Wasting Electricity

This Month in Wired: Martha Stewart?