Late last year we interviewed Asegun Henry, CEO of the Thermal Battery Corporation (TBC), a start-up out of MIT and Georgia Tech US universities, pursuing a truly unique form of thermal energy storage. The system’s conversion efficiency is 50%. The power input for TBC will simply come from the grid while output will go through thermophotovoltaic cells exposed to radiation from graphite heated to thousands of degrees Celsius. These cells ‘only’ have a little over 40% efficiency, but the light they fail to capture takes the form of heat – some of which rejoins the thermal storage and thus isn’t a loss of energy from the system. A thermophotovoltaic module about to be inserted into a graphite heat tank Most…