CUBE© Storage
StarPak CUBE© Storage forms the heart of the entire Cube© System. This centrality is simple: Several sources of free and renewable energy are flowing at different times on and through any site — solar heat, winter coldness, waste heat in flues, combustible cellulosic materials formerly deemed “solid waste”, heated water used, then dumped down the drain, and so forth. CUBE© Storage intelligently accepts ALL streams of this free energy, hot and cold, for long term storage, so it’s available later when needed.
CUBE© Hot + Cold Storage represents a giant battery, able to deliver heating, cooling and to generate power thermoelectrically.
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Qualities of the StarPak CUBE©
Stores Free Energy for When It’s Needed. The coldness of winter can be stored til summer when it’s needed for air conditioning. The heat of summer can be likewise stored til next winter. The concept of annual cycle storage is ancient. Even today, the Amish employ ice-houses filled with blocks of hand-sawn river ice to refrigerate their families’ meat and produce year-round. Everyone’s great grandparents relied on such ice-houses.
Renewable Electricity – Temperature Differentials between these long-term CUBE© Hot and Cold Storages are also exploitable to make renewable electricity on your site. Cube© Kilowatt hours costing half as much as from PV or wind. CUBE© electricity in fact is competitive with coal, yet unlike coal, Cube© ‘juice’ is clean.
Grid-Stabilizing – PV and wind power destabilize utility grid systems due to the erratic nature of their power production. PV and wind typically boast no storage. Installed en masse, and suddenly kicking on and off, they thus threaten entire regions with blackouts. CUBE© Storage by contrast is grid-stabilizing, providing predictable, reliable power day or night.
Scalable – CUBE© Storage is completely scalable, supporting requirements of a single home up to entire campus and even utility-scale energy generation.
Flexible Siting – CUBE© Storage is large, yet can be tastefully set underground, on-ground, freestanding or architecturally integrated into the structure it serves.
Heating and Cooling– While generating electrical power, CUBE© Storage also delivers space heating, process hot water, air-conditioning, even refrigeration. StarPak will engineer onsite, clean renewable CUBE© Storage to provide 100% of such needs.
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Heating, Cooling and Electricity Generated Via StarPak CUBE© Storage
How Do We Do It?
Free Heating is achieved by pumping free hot water from CUBE© Hot Storage into StarPak fin-tubing set in your ductwork ahead of the fossil (gas or oil) burners. Fin-tubing efficiently transfers the heat in the water to heat in the air. This pumping occurs the moment the building’s thermostat calls for heat. With renewable heat getting first crack, the thermostat is satisfied and the gas doesn’t turn on.
Free Cooling is achieved the same way—icy melt water from CUBE© Cold Storage is pumped into StarPak fin-tubing when the thermostat calls for summertime air conditioning. With renewable cold set in place upstream from the conventional electric-driven A/C coils, free renewable again gets first crack, and the fossil electric system doesn’t need to turn on.
Free Electricity Exploiting temperature differentials between Big Hot and Big Ice CUBE© Storage, thermoelectric engines are employed to create free electricity. This output is tuned to directly match the load. Your facility can thus enjoy clean, 24/7 renewable electricity at the same wholesale cost as dirty fossil coal.
Annual Storage Cycles It is possible to store heat and cold for very long periods of time because of geometrics of volume. A container gains or loses energy only on its surface area, which is a function (6s2) of the square of the side (in rectangle cubic shapes) or the radius (πr2h in cylindrical storage shapes). Storage Volume, in contrast, increases by cubing functions (s3). This means that as a container gets bigger, volume increases much, much faster than surface area. Thus, heat loss in relation to volume drastically shrinks as the container gets bigger. Large CUBE© Storage of ice, frozen in winter, thus provides super-cold melt water all the following summer for air conditioning. The same goes for hot water created in the summer — it’s ready for use all winter.
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