ENERGYNEST Since the EIC Accelerator: Bigger Thermal Batteries

Factories burn gas for heat far more than for anything else, and that heat is often needed when renewable power or recovered heat is not available. ENERGYNEST, a Norwegian company founded in 2011, casts steel pipes into blocks of a special concrete, pumps hot oil or steam through them to charge the blocks, and draws the heat back out hours later. It calls the product the ThermalBattery.

In the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2 round of 9 January 2019, the Horizon 2020 forerunner of today's EIC Accelerator, the European Commission selected ENERGYNEST's project HEAT2VALUE for funding. The company is the only beneficiary named for the project in the Commission's list of winners. The grant of €1,435,350 covered 70% of a €2,050,500 project to demonstrate the battery at a solar heat plant in Turnhout, Belgium, from December 2019 to November 2023, according to CORDIS. The battery was built and inaugurated within that period. What happened around it since is more complicated.

Where ENERGYNEST Stands Now

ENERGYNEST is active and selling. In January 2026 the adhesive tape maker tesa announced that ENERGYNEST would build a 10 MW power-to-heat plant with 40 MWh of storage, made of 24 modules, at its Hamburg factory, to cover about two thirds of the site's steam demand and cut about 4,600 tonnes of CO2 a year, according to tesa and ENERGYNEST. Both releases plan the groundbreaking for autumn 2026 and commissioning for summer 2027; neither gives a contract value.

On 2 September 2026 the company said it had commissioned a plant with a 3 MW electric heater and a 12 MWh ThermalBattery at LEONHARD KURZ, a thin-film maker in Sulzbach-Rosenberg, Germany, which is to replace more than 3.5 GWh of gas a year; the joint announcement quotes a KURZ executive. When the contract was signed in March 2025, ENERGYNEST called it its "first sale of a complete turnkey power-to-heat solution". Three weeks later, on 22 September 2026, the chemical company Peter Greven and ENERGYNEST announced a system with 30 MWh of storage in 15 modules for its Bad Münstereifel site, to be commissioned in summer 2028. KURZ published the commissioning on its own newsroom, and pv magazine reported the plan in March 2025. For Peter Greven, CHEManager reported in June 2026 a federally funded electric steam project with high-temperature thermal storage, to be finished by the end of 2028, without naming the storage supplier.

The register shows a company that is still funded but not yet making money. The Norwegian parent filed accounts for 2025, has no insolvency or liquidation recorded, and lists Alex Robertson as chief executive and Infracapital's Benjamin Francis on the board, according to the Brønnøysund Register Centre. Robertson, a former Vestas manager, replaced Christian Thiel, who had led the company for ten years, in February 2025, the company announced.

The Technology: Heat Stored in Concrete Pipes

Electric batteries store power; ENERGYNEST stores heat, which is what most industrial processes actually use. In its modules, U-shaped carbon steel pipes are cast into a concrete the company calls Heatcrete. Hot thermal oil or steam flows through the pipes to charge the concrete and, when heat is needed, cooler fluid picks it up again. One module holds 1 to 2 MWh depending on temperatures, and modules are delivered uninsulated, stacked on site and insulated as one block, according to solarthermalworld.org, which counted ENERGYNEST in early 2024 among six of 31 high-temperature storage suppliers with commercial systems in operation.

The best-known alternative is molten salt, used in solar power plants and by the Norwegian rival Kyoto Group, whose 18 MWh salt store in Aalborg solarthermalworld.org compared with ENERGYNEST's systems. ENERGYNEST's pitch is modularity and low maintenance; tesa's release cites a design life of at least 25 years. The company says it holds patents on the module and system design, and CORDIS lists two patent filings by ENERGYNEST under the project: a Norwegian "Thermal energy battery" filing of July 2019 and a modular storage system filing from December 2018.

The business has shifted since the EIC award. In 2019 the CORDIS objective described a product that stores waste heat from industry and power plants, with a solar thermal plant as the first demonstration. Since 2025 the company sells mainly power-to-heat: an electric heater turns cheap or on-site renewable power into heat, and the battery stores it until the factory needs it. Its website now leads with heat "cheaper than gas" and energy market optimisation. The ThermalBattery is still the core of every system, so the change is a new use of the funded technology, not a different product.

What HEAT2VALUE Promised, and What the Record Shows

The project objective was to demonstrate the ThermalBattery at a concentrated solar thermal (CST) plant built by Azteq in Turnhout, storing excess solar heat for the nearby Avery Dennison adhesive factory to cut its gas use. It also promised to "activate" a European supply chain, with steel from the Czech Republic or Romania, concrete from Germany, module prefabrication in the Netherlands and engineering in Norway and Spain.

The final report says the engineering was completed, the solar field and battery were built in the second period and the plant was commissioned in late August 2023. Six modules with 5.5 MWh of capacity were to displace about 2,100 MWh of natural gas and save around 450 tonnes of CO2 a year. Avery Dennison inaugurated the installation on 6 September 2023, with Belgium's energy minister attending, according to the joint release, which gives the capacity as 5 MWh and notes that the battery was funded by Horizon 2020. Avery Dennison's own release of the same day describes the plant as commissioned, with six storage modules of 5 MWh, and expects heat equivalent to 2.3 GWh of gas a year. Solarthermalworld.org reported in March 2024 that the battery had been running "since summer 2023", charging at 380 °C and discharging at 310 °C. The local energy cooperative Campina Energie, which co-financed the solar field, also describes the six storage modules as part of the installation.

The record after the project is thinner. Azteq, the solar partner, became insolvent in December 2024, which "delayed the project's commissioning" because legal and technical issues had to be resolved, solarthermalworld.org reported in July 2026. Campina Energie took full ownership of the solar field in January 2026, and the plant entered regular operation in March 2026. That account conflicts with the September 2023 commissioning announced by the companies. It also does not mention the ThermalBattery at all, and it notes that on a sunny day in April 2026 about half the collectors were defocused because the factory could not absorb all the solar heat. Whether the battery is in use today, and how much gas it has actually saved, could not be verified. No operating data for the storage has been published.

1. Build the ThermalBattery at the Turnhout CST plantDeliveredSix modules installed and inaugurated in September 2023, inside the project period (CORDIS, solarthermalworld.org).
2. First storage on the new silicone heat transfer fluidPartly shownThe solar field runs on silicone oil, per solarthermalworld.org; storage performance with it is not published.
3. About 450 tonnes of CO2 saved a yearUnverifiedNo measured savings published; the solar plant only entered regular operation in March 2026.
4. European supply chain for modulesUnverifiedA Dutch entity was set up in 2023; suppliers in the Czech Republic, Romania and Germany are not named publicly.
5. Commercial roll-out after the demonstrationDeliveredOrders from LEONHARD KURZ, tesa and Peter Greven, 2025 to 2026.

The Money

The project grant was small next to the private money that followed. On 12 April 2021 ENERGYNEST signed an investment agreement for €110 million with Infracapital, the infrastructure equity arm of M&G plc, which became its largest shareholder; the money was meant to fund "financed turnkey energy storage solutions" for industrial clients, according to the company's release. Solarthermalworld.org and IREI also reported the EUR 110 million from Infracapital as making it the largest shareholder; Wikipedia calls it a majority stake, which neither release states. The deal replaced a stock market listing: in March 2021 Finansavisen reported that Robert Hvide Macleod, a former executive in John Fredriksen's group, was joining the board to take the company public at a valuation that could approach NOK 3 billion, and on 12 April it reported that the listing was dropped after Infracapital's investment, which it put at NOK 1.1 billion. Macleod still sits on the board, per the register. How much of the €110 million has been paid in, and on what terms, is not public. Before the EIC award, the company had received a €50,000 Horizon 2020 SME Instrument Phase 1 grant for a feasibility study, TEStore, in 2016 and 2017. The EIC award was grant only; the company does not appear in the EIC Fund's portfolio. In October 2024 the Commission named ENERGYNEST among 72 companies joining the EIC Scaling Club, a support programme for fundraising and partnerships that does not invest itself; Tech.eu lists it in the club's batteries and energy storage group.

The register accounts of the Norwegian parent show heavy losses. Operating income was NOK 8.4 million in 2023, NOK 2.2 million in 2024 and NOK 13.6 million in 2025, against net losses of NOK 137.5 million, NOK 249.3 million and NOK 250.5 million, according to the register's accounts data; North Data shows the same losses for 2024 and 2025. A large part of each loss is not cash: the balance sheet carries goodwill of NOK 1.19 billion at the end of 2023, falling by NOK 152.4 million in each of 2024 and 2025 to NOK 882.7 million. The register data do not explain where this goodwill comes from. Wage costs fell from NOK 34.8 million in 2023 to NOK 18.2 million in 2025.

The sources disagree on revenue. North Data lists revenue of NOK 141.4 million for 2023, while the register's accounts data give NOK 8.4 million of operating income for that year; North Data's earlier figures (NOK 25.0 million in 2019, NOK 102.0 million in 2021) could not be checked against the filed accounts. The parent's figures also leave out its foreign units, including the German subsidiary opened in 2020 and the Dutch entity set up in 2023, so the group's turnover is not public.

Shareholders keep paying in. Paid-in equity rose from NOK 167.0 million at the end of 2023 to NOK 353.9 million at the end of 2025, and the register recorded a new share capital figure in April 2026. Cash stood at NOK 33.3 million at the end of 2025, down from NOK 58.8 million a year earlier.

Why Europe Should Care

Industry causes about 40% of global greenhouse gas emissions and industrial heat is its single largest source, ENERGYNEST argues in its CORDIS report. Systems like ENERGYNEST's let a factory buy electricity when it is cheap or produce it on site, then use it as heat around the clock, which reduces dependence on imported gas and makes electricity demand more flexible for the grid. The KURZ release links the project to the EU's "Fit for 55" package and the Green Deal. The German projects show who pays for this today: the KURZ plant was funded by the federal economy ministry, and the Peter Greven system by Germany's Federal Funding for Industry and Climate Action, according to the two releases.

The company itself is Norwegian, with offices in Hamburg, Seville, Madrid and Rotterdam, and its largest shareholder is a UK infrastructure investor. The EIC grant paid for a demonstration in Belgium that became a reference project for later sales in Germany.

The Verdict

ENERGYNEST and the EIC were not asked for comment for this article. It is based on public records and published statements, linked throughout.