Sumitomo Heavy Industry

Sumitomo Heavy Industries, Ltd. (SHI) traces its roots to industrial machinery operations established by the Sumitomo family in 1888, formally incorporated as Sumitomo Machinery Co. in 1934 and reorganized as Sumitomo Heavy Industries, Ltd. in 1969. Headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, SHI is a diversified industrial machinery manufacturer trading on the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE: 6302) with products spanning power transmission and control equipment, plastic injection molding machines, environmental and power systems, semiconductor manufacturing equipment, cryogenic technology, and construction machinery. The company employs tens of thousands of people globally across its numerous subsidiaries.

SHI’s relevance to cleantech and long-duration energy storage is primarily through its $46 million strategic investment in Highview Power, announced in February 2020, which also established Sumitomo SHI FW (SFW) — SHI’s Finland-based combustion and power systems subsidiary — as the global technology center and deployment hub for Highview Power’s CRYOBattery™ liquid air energy storage (LAES) system. Under this arrangement, SFW licenses Highview’s technology and provides engineering, manufacturing, and project execution services for LAES deployments in Europe, Asia, and the Americas, while SHI executives joined Highview’s board of directors.

Liquid air energy storage (LAES), also called cryogenic energy storage, is a long-duration storage technology that uses electricity to compress and cool ambient air to approximately -196°C, liquefying it and reducing its volume by a factor of 700. The liquid air is stored at low pressure in vacuum-insulated tanks — essentially the same technology used to store liquid natural gas. When power is needed, the liquid air is warmed back to ambient temperature, rapidly expanding 700-fold and driving a turbine to generate electricity. The system can also recover and reuse waste cold from the liquefaction stage, significantly improving round-trip efficiency. Unlike electrochemical batteries, LAES systems have no fire risk, use no critical minerals, and have an operational lifetime of over 30 years. They can be configured from 20 MW/100 MWh to 200 MW/2 GWh or larger at a single site.

SHI’s CRYOBattery™ portfolio through SFW now encompasses active projects in the UK, where Highview Power has received government Contracts for Difference (CfD) support for two 3.2 GWh liquid air plants, representing among the world’s most ambitious long-duration storage commitments outside of pumped hydro. SHI’s engineering heritage in cryogenic systems, turbomachinery, and power generation — all core to LAES technology — gives it a natural competitive advantage in manufacturing and deploying this specific system type.