Renewell Energy
With renewable energy generation quickly gaining market share, a need is developing for energy storage on a scale the world has never seen before. Concurrently, there are over 3 million inactive oil and gas wells in North America. Our technology will tackle both of these problems simultaneously, massively deploying gravity-based energy storage at a very low added cost. Our solution will build the greenest, most flexible, and largest distributed energy storage network currently feasible. With a potential of over 7 GWhs at $50/kWh, we can deliver the storage necessary for wind and solar to experience uninhibited market share growth. We are developing a low-risk and zero-self-discharge energy storage technology that can operate in both short duration (2 to 8 hours) and long duration (weeks to months) scenarios. Renewell will partner with energy companies to retrofit these already grid-connected wells with a proprietary energy storage device and pair that with an intelligent software-based controls platform to optimize operations.
Team Members
Kemp Gregory (MS, CEE), Stefan Streckfus (MS, CEE), Yuval Tamir (MSx, GSB), Berk Manav (MS, CEE), Walker Colt (Rice, MBA), and PI: Prof. Sally Benson (ERE)
Learn more:
Is ‘battery’ the next gig for California’s retiring oil wells? Valley startup thinks so, The Business Journal, Feb. 2023