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Google makes its first investment in long-duration energy storage
6/8/2025
News
Google has signed its first partnership with a long-duration energy storage (LDES) company, Energy Dome, as it looks to meet its growing electricity needs with clean power generation. Alongside the commercial agreement, it has also invested an undisclosed sum in the Italian start-up, which has developed a novel approach to energy storage, using CO2 held in a dome-shaped ‘battery’.
Google says that energy storage is vital to achieving its ambition to run on 24/7 carbon-free energy on every grid where it operates by 2030. It has been investing in a wide range of technologies, from enhanced geothermal to advanced nuclear and even fusion technologies; and now LDES.
Energy Dome’s closed-circuit thermo-mechanical system consists of a gas holder, compressor and turbine. It ‘charges’ the system by drawing CO2 from the ‘dome’ gas holder and compressing it into its liquid phase. When energy is needed, the system evaporates and expands the CO2 into a gas, whose pressure drives a turbine, generating electricity to be dispatched back to the grid. The principle is much like steam escaping a pressure cooker. (Click here to view a motion graphic demonstrating the charging/discharging process.)
The CO2 Battery can store and discharge energy for longer periods than traditional lithium-ion batteries, says the Milan-based company – between 8–24 hours, compared to around four hours for a lithium-ion battery project of the same capacity.
Energy Dome reports that its technology uses only water, steel and CO2, and does not rely on any critical minerals such as lithium. It says that no CO2 emissions are released into the atmosphere during the entire process. By storing the CO2 in its liquid phase at ambient, not cryogenic, temperatures, the technology ‘massively reduces’ the costs that are typically associated with compressed air energy storage, adds the company.
Energy Dome’s first large-scale CO2 Battery project, a 20 MW/200 MWh plant, recently entered commercial operations in Sardinia. It followed a successful demonstration project which fed electricity into the Italian grid for more than three years. The company has also signed contracts for commercial-scale projects in Italy (with Engie), the US (with Alliant Energy) and India (with NTPC).
Google’s need for electricity will continue to grow as more data centres are required to meet increasing global demand for AI products and services. A recent University of Cambridge report, for example, warns AI could drive a 25-fold rise in tech industry energy use by 2040, threatening net zero targets.
Indeed, the company is rolling out a new tool in the UK that will use AI to generate search results. Users selecting ‘AI Mode’ will be given answers to their queries in a more ‘conversational’ style summary, as well as a list of search results linking to other websites with relevant information. The new tool, which uses Google’s Gemini AI platform to generate answers to search queries, has already been launched in the US and India.
