The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Loan Programs Office (LPO) announced a conditional commitment to IceBrick Energy Assets I, LLC, a subsidiary of Nostromo Energy, Inc., for a loan guarantee of up to $305.54 million to finance Project IceBrick, a virtual power plant (VPP) consisting of up to 193 cold thermal energy storage (TES) installations at commercial buildings across California.
The company’s patented IceBrick system is a 12-foot by 20-inch rectangular energy storage block with a 132 gallon volume.
Project IceBrick is designed to provide customers with efficiency as a service by freezing a water-based solution during hours when electricity supply is at its most abundant and clean. The IceBrick system stores and later uses the ice to support cooling of the building during hours of peak demand, when the power grid faces highest demand.
The IceBrick systems use Nostromo’s Cirrus software platform to operate as a VPP by orchestrating multiple energy assets to function together or as individual assets.
At full scale, Nostromo reports that the project could provide the equivalent of approximately 170 MW 450 MWh of behind-the-meter storage capacity for hotels, offices, data centers, and other commercial buildings.
Project IceBrick is the third VPP project that the LPO has announced and the first to use TES. The potential for VPPs to alleviate grid load is significant as DOE reports that peak hours air conditioning accounts for approximately 50% of U.S. electricity load during those hours.
VPPs are aggregations of electrified, grid-connected devices, including grid interactive efficient buildings. They reduce utilities’ reliance on natural gas peaker plants and the strain on transmission and distribution infrastructure by time-shifting cooling loads to shave electricity demand from times of peak usage, when electricity is most carbon-intensive.