With its carbon-based storage tech, startup Noon could be among the first to commercialize clean energy storage that can power the grid for days.
A former NASA scientist wants to break through the barriers to cheap long-duration energy storage. And he’s doing it with ingredients as basic as carbon and oxygen.
Chris Graves co-founded Noon Energy in 2018 after working on a tool for NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover that snatches carbon dioxide out of the red planet’s atmosphere and converts it into oxygen. Along the way, Graves realized that this process could be tweaked to store clean energy very cheaply for longer periods of time than what’s commercially viable with today’s lithium-ion batteries.
The 10-person team at Noon successfully scaled up a lab prototype’s storage capacity by a factor of 50 in the last 14 months, which gave them confidence that the core technology will work at the scale of a grid power plant. With that in hand, the company raised $28 million Series A financing announced Wednesday. It had previously raised a $3 million seed round while remaining coy about what its technology entailed.
Clean Energy Ventures led the new round with Aramco Ventures’ Sustainability Fund (yes, that Aramco). Other investors included Emerson Collective, At One Ventures, Mistletoe and Doral Energy-Tech Ventures. window clear in small or old apartments that may only have one or two windows.