Storing electricity to use up to eight days later - electricity that comes from renewable sources. This is the milestone being marked by Malta, the U.S. company dedicated to clean technologies. Its Managing Director in Spain, Michael Geyer, sees the Iberian Peninsula as a strategic region to deploy these new technologies, or ‘cleantech’. “The Iberian Peninsula is in a privileged position to host innovative solutions for energy storage based on cleantech,” he explained in an interview with bbva.com.
Q: What is Malta?
A: Our parent company, Malta Inc, is a leading company in long-term energy storage solutions. The concept of Malta’s high temperature heat pump electricity storage technology was invented in 2012 by Robert B. Laughlin, a professor at Stanford University and Nobel Laureate in Physics.
In 2015, the technology incubator X, previously known as Alphabet’s innovation lab, Google X, acquired the rights to develop this technology. At Google X, the project received the name of Malta and a team was put together to conduct extensive research on both the technology and the potential markets for its application.
After graduating from the Google X program, Malta Inc. was established as an independent startup in August 2018. Currently, its investors include Breakthrough Energy Ventures and European technological investors, such as Alfa Laval, Proman Holding AG and Siemens Energy, among others.
Its Spanish subsidiary, Malta Iberia Pumped Heat Electricity SLU (Malta Iberia), has the mandate to roll out and implement Malta’s electro-thermal energy storage technology in the Iberian Peninsula.
Q: You recently attended one of the biggest events in energy and new technologies. How was the Breakthrough Energy Summit?
A: I participated in the meetings of the Energy Resilience Leadership Group (ERLG), which aims to improve Europe’s energy resilience. It is led by Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy and Siemens Energy. I met with executives from large corporations, leading politicians, financial institutions and startups to expand the scale of emerging climate technologies and roll out commercially viable projects.
Following two years of global inflation due to global armed conflicts, participating companies expressed their utmost concern over maintaining an affordable energy supply in Europe to avoid being forced to transfer their manufacturing hubs to locations with more competitive energy.
The cooperation between BBVA and Malta will serve to accelerate the energy transition in Iberia and attract new cleantech industries.
In our case, the Iberian Peninsula is in a privileged position to host innovative solutions for energy storage based on cleantech. The cooperation between BBVA and Malta will serve to accelerate the energy transition in Iberia and attract new cleantech industries.
Q: You signed an agreement with BBVA. What does it entail?
A: It is a memorandum of understanding (MOU) that establishes a global framework for Malta and BBVA to collaborate in joint activities that take advantage of Malta’s advanced energy storage technology and BBVA’s financial expertise. The mcweop a power purchase agreement (PPA) to roll out Malta’s energy storage technology. In addition, the MOU aims to strengthen and improve the existing relationship between Malta and BBVA, moving toward a fully collaborative partnership.
This memorandum of understanding with BBVA represents an important milestone in our efforts to deploy our energy storage technology - the first of its kind. By incorporating BBVA’s financial innovation with our advanced storage solutions, we aim to create a viable model for future energy storage projects.
It is very important to reach agreements like the one we signed with BBVA in order to move forward in financing projects that enable greater renewable energy storage capacity, and without a double, progress in the transition and decarbonization.
Q: Malta’s solution mainly focuses on storing energy from renewable sources. What exactly does this technology involve?
A: The ultimate goal is to balance the supply and demand of electricity through energy storage and to do so with renewable sources.
Malta’s innovative commercial-scale, long-term synchronous energy storage solution stores electricity with variable and intermittent power generation. It turns it into manageable synchronous electricity that can be fed into the power grid on demand to replace energy from natural gas combined cycle plants.
We can store between eight hours and eight days of electricity, with the capacity to expand the duration based on future needs. Our solution also generates clean heat for industrial processes and urban heating, better known by the term ‘district heating’. It bridges the gap between short-term storage in lithium batteries and seasonal storage in hydrogen.
We can store between eight hours and eight days of electricity
To achieve this, Malta combines processes such as molten salt storage from concentrated solar energy, with proven technology from other sectors, such as the turbo-machines from natural gas power plants and steam turbines; and liquified natural gas heat exchangers. Molten salt storage technology has a long proven track record and was first established in Andalusia with the first Andasol plants that began operations in 2008.
Michael Geyer, Managing Director of Malta in Spain.
Q: What can cleantech companies contribute to the decarbonization challenge?
A: Cleantech refers to technologies that contribute to sustainability and environmental protection. This encompasses both emission reduction, as well as biodiversity conservation and water treatment. Replacing the use of fossil fuels with renewable energy is an important step in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Malta’s storage balances the electricity demand curve and heat with the supply curve from variable energies, ensuring production 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. This not only minimizes emissions, it also reduces cost by taking advantage of the times when energy costs are low for storage charging.
Q: What are the differences between cleantech and climatech?
A: Although we tend to use the terms climatech and cleantech interchangeably, they are not synonymous nor does one concept encompass the other. In fact, they are more like twinned concepts, with some common areas, but slightly different goals. While climate technologies, or ‘climatech’ has a set of priorities that aim to address the global climate challenge due to emissions from human activities, clean technologies, or ‘cleantech’ focus on improving the efficiency of all humanities activities and interactions with the environment that surrounds us.
Q: How important is financing for such innovative, sustainable projects?
A: In order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through the use of innovative technologies, we must replace the combustion of fossil fuels with technologies for the collection, storage and generation of electricity and heat based on clean energy, such as solar, wind, geothermal, etc. Unlike fossil fuel plants that consume and acquire fuels throughout their 20 to 30 years of useful life, renewable energy generators need to replace this model with an initial investment in technology. This investment requires financing from the beginning of their operating life.
In order to attract this initial financing, investors and lenders need security about income flows from the sale of the energy generated, and in the case of storage, also the cost of charging energy. The cooperation between Malta and BBVA will develop new PPA instruments for charge and discharge, thus ensuring the income flow and costs of large storage projects.
Q: Your company is from the U.S. You live in Spain and are the Head of Malta in the Iberian Peninsula. With this two-fold vision, how would you compare the regulations, and also the market in the U.S. with Europe in terms of decarbonization and its incentives?
A: In June 2021, the European Union launched the ‘Green Deal’ which aims to transform its economy to ensure a modern, competitive and efficient use of resources. To achieve its goals, the EU offers a range of non-fiscal incentives, such as own funds, national funds and the Next Generation EU Fund, which Member States can assign directly, with no need for approval by EU authorities. There are also qualified reimbursable fiscal credits that can be requested for projects aligned with the ‘Green Deal’.
On the other hand, in the summer of 2022, the U.S. introduced the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) with a similar approach. The IRA addresses inflation by reducing the national debt, and healthcare and energy costs for the next ten years. It focuses specifically on fiscal incentives in the form of transferable tax credit, extending and expanding various energy-related federal income tax credits.
For companies with innovation, industrialization and/or decarbonization plans, this means that they can choose to apply for subsidies and loans in the European Union, or tax credits in the U.S., depending on their global growth strategies.
United States offers a robust system of direct tax credits
In short, while the EU focuses on a framework of non-fiscal incentives and funds for a sustainable transition, the U.S. offers a robust system of direct tax credits, providing complementary, but very different approaches to reach their decarbonization goals.
Q: What is Malta’s road map for the Iberian Peninsula? When will we see its first plant operating in Iberia?
A: In Iberia, our next step is to carry out a commercial demonstration project called Malta-D with up to 10M of power generation during discharge, which will be the first considered under the MoU with BBVA to supply green electricity. We are currently preparing the engineering for this initial project with our technological partners to start construction in 2025, and connect it to the grid by the end of 2026.
In parallel, we are developing commercial storage projects of approximately 100 MWe of stand-alone power generation, and integrated with solar and wind projects. We expect to start construction in 2027 once we have the initial results from operating the Malta-D demonstration plant. We estimate that it will take around 30 months for construction and commissioning, and anticipate that commercial operations of these energy storage will start in 2029.