Accepting the SolarPACES Technology Innovation Award 2025 for the Innovative High-Temperature Air-Based Integrated CST for Flexible Renewable Heat are Pok Wan Kwang and Gediz Karaca from ODQA, with Rafael Guedez, Silvia Trevisan and Konstantinos Apostolopoulos-Kalkavouras from KTH
The 2025 Technology Innovation Award was jointly presented to ODQA, a University of Oxford spin-off, together with KTH Royal Institute of Technology, for their pioneering work advancing high-temperature air-based industrial heat.
ODQA’s rotary receiver generates air at above 1000 °C, adapting principles from gas turbine engineering, while KTH’s radial packed-bed thermal energy storage efficiently stores and releases this heat on demand, reducing pressure drops by over 50% and system costs by 60%. KTH’s research turned these concepts from laboratory experiments into proven prototypes, leading successful integration and testing with ODQA’s rotary air receiver, thus making flexible, cost-effective industrial-scale solar heat.
Proven at pilot scale with industrial hot air applications, their integrated system is advancing through demonstration at PSA, offering a scalable path to decarbonize high-temperature industries with renewable solar heat. Special recognition in this proposal, apart from technical quality, was given to the intense international collaboration including the use of facilities of several SolarPACES members during different development steps.
Further information: Innovative High-Temperature Air-Based Integrated CST for Flexible Renewable Heat
