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Antora Energy( Antora), an American energy technology company, is establishing cheap, clean energy as the standard for powering global industry. Founded with a mission to have the most significant positive impact on the planet, the company aims to electrify the manufacturing sector, which stands as the largest single source of global emissions. To address these emissions effectively, Antora sought a solution to convert the cheapest hours of electricity generation from sources like wind and solar into the continuous heat and power essential for the manufacturing industry. Following extensive research efforts, the firm identified thermal batteries as the simplest and most cost-effective method to deliver industrial energy. Nehali Jain, Chief of Staff, introduces us to Antora and its core solutions.
“ At Antora, we design and deploy thermal batteries to drive always-on industrial operations using low-cost energy. We were established in 2018 in response to two trends that were clearly noticeable. First, solar and wind were emerging as the cheapest form of primary energy sources in various parts of the world. Second, the industrial sector contributes approximately 30 percent of emissions, with about two-thirds of these emissions originating from industrial heat and power. At the time, there was no viable method to utilize these variable sources of energy for industrial heat, as their intermittent nature is incompatible with industries that demand uninterrupted operations. This sparked the idea for Antora: to leverage cost-effective thermal energy storage to capture and store intermittent electricity. Since our inception, we have made significant progress. In 2023, we launched our inaugural commercialscale demonstration facility in Fresno, California, which has now been demonstrating
our battery systems at full scale for the past two years. Moreover, last year we opened our manufacturing facility in San Jose, where we are currently producing thermal batteries for our first large-scale commercial deployments,” she begins.
Thermal batteries may sound like an intimidating and complex solution to the industrial sector’ s carbon emissions problem, but Nehali explains that their operating process is rather simple.“ In essence, we charge our thermal batteries at the time when electricity is cheapest on the grid, often due to variable resources being produced in excess. We understand the market supply-demand patterns and then use that
◀ Nehali Jain, Chief of Staff
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