Quidnet Awarded $10 Million to Fund CPS Energy Pumped Hydro Storage Project

by Peter Maloney
APPA News
December 13, 2022

Quidnet Energy has been selected to receive $10 million in funding from the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) for a pumped hydro storage project the Houston company is developing for CPS Energy, the public power utility serving San Antonio, Texas.

Quidnet plans to use the ARPA-E funding to scale up its Geomechanical Pumped Storage (GPS) project to a 1-megawatt (MW), 10-megawatt hour (MWh) commercial system.

CPS Energy signed a 15-year capacity tolling agreement with Quidnet in March. The energy storage project could eventually be scaled up to as much as 15 MW.

CPS Energy said the project will support its “Flexible Path” Resource Plan to reduce net emissions by 80 percent by 2040.

Quidnet’s geomechanical technology stores energy by using renewable resources to pressurize water and store it underground in “storage lens” between layers of rock. The storage lens technology has been successfully demonstrated using different geologies across the United States, the DOE said.

Quidnet, which was co-founded by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, hopes to move its GPS technology from pilot scale to commercial scale by increasing the size of the storage lens, improving lens sealing, and commissioning the first grid-connected system. The company said the commercialization of the technology is aided by the fact that it uses existing drilling and hydropower machinery supply chains.

The funding for the GPS project falls under ARPA-E’s Seeding Critical Advances for Leading Energy technologies with Untapped Potential (SCALEUP) program, which provides further funding to previous ARPA-E teams that have been determined to be feasible for widespread deployment and commercialization.

Quidnet said its objective is to lower the cost of long-duration energy storage, that is, energy storage capable of providing 10 or more hours of electrical output, by 50 to 75 percent in an effort to make intermittent renewable energy sources more reliable and cost effective.