Loughborough University - Equipment Account

A new laboratory at Loughborough University will build and test systems that store renewable energy as high-grade heat—temperatures high enough to later drive industrial processes or generate electricity. This matters because the UK’s shift to wind and solar power creates a growing mismatch: energy is abundant when the wind blows or the sun shines, but scarce when it does not. Batteries can smooth short gaps, but storing energy for hours or days at grid scale remains expensive. Heat storage offers a cheaper alternative, especially for the large amounts of energy needed by heavy industry or national grids. However, engineers lack the test platforms needed to move promising heat-storage materials from the lab bench to real-world systems. The ThemExS Lab will fill that gap. Its £1.7 million of equipment splits into three categories: materials characterisation (£0.536M) to study how storage materials behave at high temperatures; bench-scale platforms (£0.297M) to test heat transfer and fluid flow; and transition-scale platforms (£0.866M) that mimic full-scale system behaviour. If successful, the lab will help industry and grid operators deploy cost-effective, long-duration heat storage—quietly strengthening the energy infrastructure that keeps factories running and homes heated when renewables falter.