Poet Storing Wind Power in Thermal Blocks to Power Big Stone Ethanol Plant

What good is wind power (say the fossil-fuel hacks trying to keep us dependent on their finite and poison oil) if the wind doesn’t blow when we need it?

Antora Energy has an answer. The California company just built an energy storage plant at Poet’s Big Stone Energy ethanol plant that can store excess wind power as heat in big carbon blocks, which Poet can then tap to make steam and electricity—and greener ethanol—whenever it wants:

Thermal energy storage collects low-cost, off-peak energy from virtually any source – local wind turbines in this case – and stores it as heat in insulated blocks of solid carbon that reach 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The heat, which can be stored until needed, is then transferred into an oil that allows it to be carried to industrial users, in this instance the POET plant next door.

There, the heat is transferred to steam that powers boilers, distillers and other machinery used in production of ethanol and a host of other byproducts generated at the POET plant. The Big Stone plant produces 92 million gallons of ethanol annually, [Poet president/COO Jeff] Lautt said.

…The project uses very little water and does not create any substantial emissions, [Antora CEO Andrew] Ponec said.

To illustrate the nimble nature of thermal storage, Ponec noted that the Big Stone facility was built in less than a year. The facility is already providing power to POET’s plant and should be fully online in October.

…Antora makes money on the project by selling its energy to POET while opening the door to greater sustainable electricity production in the region and lowering power costs for the ethanol plant, Lautt said.

“It creates more efficiency for us, so we’re then using less natural gas to operate the facility, which makes us greener,” he said [Bart Pfankuch, “1 of World’s Largest Energy Storage Plants Launches in SD,” South Dakota News Watch, 2026.05.19].

If turning wind into heat into steam into electricity sounds a little too Rube Goldberg for you, Antora has a way to remove a step from that process. Their carbon blocks get so hot that they glow, and Antora can harvest that glow with photovoltaic panels:

Antora leverages renewable electricity to heat blocks of solid carbon—a low-cost, earth-abundant, and safe storage medium that’s used extensively across industries—to glowing hot temperatures in an insulated battery module. The stored heat is then reliably delivered at the scale and temperatures that large industrial operations demand, or can be converted directly into electricity using Antora’s TPV technology—unlocking the dual heat and power output needed to completely replace the fossil fuels used in today’s manufacturing processes for sectors like food & beverage, paper products, chemicals, steel, and cement [Antora, press release, 2024.06.25].

An MIT professor is working on similar thermophotovoltaic technology, which the professor’s company, Fourth Power, likens to “putting the sun in a box“—or, in Poet/Antora’s case, putting the wind in a box. Nice trick!