Aquabattery

AquaBattery is a young company (www.aquabattery.nl) which has the ambition to introduce energy storage based on water flows with different salt concentrations. AquaBattery was founded in March 2014 by 2 experienced researchers, and is now a S.M.E. run by 6 researchers and entrepreneurs from Dutch and Italian origin. Although the main office is located in The Netherlands, staff is working in UK and Italy as well. Our activities focus on applied R&D to assemble a battery using osmotic energy and market analysis to introduce such battery in different market segments. The work of AquaBattery has been awarded with several prizes and grants (winner Delft Energy Initiative Award 2014, Climate-KIC grant, runner-up in Philips Innovation Award 2015, STW Feasibility Study Grant and winner Get In The Ring 2015), which has resulted in a small scale prototype of a battery storing electricity in salt and fresh water (i.e., osmotic energy only).
This year, AquaBattery has recognized the effective use of bipolar membranes in catalysis, derived from R&D of one of the founders (Vermaas et al., 2015, J.Mat.Chem.A.). The additional use of pH gradients in batteries driven by osmotic energy would generate an order of magnitude higher energy density, thereby offering additional functionality to the existing battery product of AquaBattery and allowing to introduce such battery for new EES applications.