Alphabet Inc.’s latest moonshot project appears to be one of its most ambitious yet.

Google Inc.’s parent company has revealed to Bloomberg that its secretive X research group is working on a project meant to tackle one of the biggest economic obstacles to renewable energy initiatives: underutilization. The issue lies with the fact that solar and wind farms produce the most power at times when consumption is fairly limited, which forces utilities to discard electricity. Reducing waste could help lower the cost barriers that are standing in the way of wider adoption.

Alphabet hopes to achieve that by developing an energy storage system that can capture excess power for later use. The X group has already built a prototype based on an approach invented by Nobel prize-winning physicist Robert Laughlin, who is a consultant to the project.

Renderings released by Alphabet show the system to consist of four tanks that are connected to a heat pump via a complex set of pipes. Two are meant to be filled with antifreeze or a hydrocarbon liquid while the other pair contains salt, which excels at retaining heat. When power supply exceeds demand, unused electricity is converted into two separate streams of hot and cool air that go in different directions.

The cool air is funneled to the tanks containing antifreeze and the hot air heats up the salt. Alphabet said that process can then be reversed to produce two powerful gusts that spin a turbine, which returns the captured power to the grid.  

There have been other attempts to implement Laughlin’s approach, but the company claims that its project stands out. One of the reasons is that the system doesn’t require the expensive ceramics and steels that have historically been used to regulate temperatures. Moreover, Alphabet claims that the underlying design is flexible enough to be implemented both in small modular forms and on an industrial scale.

If successful, the project could enable the company to tap what X director Obi Felten described as “trillions and trillions of dollars in market opportunity.” It could also open a new competitive front against Tesla Inc., which rivals Alphabet in autonomous vehicles.

The new system can theoretically retain energy for many hours or days, much longer than the traditional lithium-ion batteries that Tesla uses in its projects. But Elon Musk’s company has a considerable head-start. That lead is only growing: Tesla recently won a bid to build what is set to become the world’s largest energy storage system.

Image: Alphabet