What is the BlueInvest Project Pipeline?
See our showcase of innovative projects and entrepreneurs who are shaping the Blue Economy.
Projects consist of innovative, scalable and sustainable business ventures from traditional and emerging sectors of the maritime economy.
The graphs below provide an overview of the country distribution, sector, and TRL of projects currently listed in the BlueInvest Project Pipeline.
Selection Criteria:
Your company is EU-based or from an eligible sea basin region (Georgia, Turkey, Ukraine, Moldova, Montenegro, Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, North Macedonia, Serbia, Turkey, Israel, Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Lebanon, Syria, Libya, Mauritania, United Kingdom, or Norway)
Your project TRL is 4 or higher
Your project sector is in one of the 10 blue economy sectors identified for this initiative
Your solution has a clear sustainable impact on the blue economy
Your project is looking for investment
Project Country
Country in which the project is being developed and / or implemented.
Project Sector
Main blue economy sector the project relates to.
Project TRL
Current technology readiness level of the project.
FLASC B.V.
Balancing supply and demand is quickly becoming the biggest obstacle to the increased uptake of renewable energy. Due to the intermittent nature of the resource, a reliable and sustainable supply of energy requires the integration of sufficient flexibility within the energy system. An excellent source of flexibility is energy storage, which can act as a suitable buffer such that the supply of electricity t the consumer over time is not directly dependent on intermittent renewable energy production levels.
Short-duration storage (1 - 4 hours) can be addressed using batteries, whereas weekly to seasonal variations will need dispatch-able resources such as green hydrogen. This leaves a critical intermediate gap, typically referred to as long-duration energy storage, which is precisely where the FLASC HPES technology is positioned as an energy storage solution.
Long-duration energy storage allows the maximum utilization of renewable energy assets with the minimum deployed energy storage infrastructure and can significantly improve the economics of renewable energy production assets in the most cost-effective and symbiotic manner. The substantial market opportunity for long-duration energy storage has been highlighted by McKinsey & Co in their 2021 report on the subject.
FLASC’s proprietary HPES technology uses a hydro-pneumatic liquid piston, whereby seawater is pumped into a closed chamber to compress a fixed, pre-charged volume of gas. The energy is recovered by allowing the compressed gas to push the water back out thro a hydraulic turbine generator.
The system is built on well-proven technologies with established supply chains that are familiar and well understood by the offshore industry. This also implies no specific environmental or regulatory issues, and the solution can be readily deployed as part of any pre- consented activities associated with offshore renewable energy systems.
Thanks to a patented pre-charging process, the solution has 20 times the energy density in shallow waters, when compared with competing solutions that use hydrostatic pressure. The solution also has a high round-trip efficiency thanks to an innovative use of the marine environment as a natural heatsink. This marine heatsink effect has been successfully validated in prototype tests.
Main Features
- Scalability: > 100 MWh
- Roundtrip Efficiency: 70 - 75%
- Operational Lifetime: +30 years
- Charge/Discharge Time: 4 - 12 hrs
- Response Time: 10 - 30 seconds
- Deployment Water Depth: 40 - 400m
Key Benefits
- Offshore Solution: maximum use of offshore space, optimized electrical infrastructure with unique flexibility options.
- Sustainable: long, predictable asset life with no cycling degradation or consumable elements.
- Reliable: well-proven components with low operating cost.
- Safe: no fire risks or chemical hazards throughout its life cycle.
- Cost Effective: Cost competitive with land-based options.