Top Innovators
Josh Barron is a Research Engineer with Southern Company Services Research and Development and served as the Project Manager from the proposal stage in 2019 through the testing that ended in 2024. Scott Machovec is a Principal Engineer in Project Management for Southern Company Services. Rob Szmyd is a Senior Project Engineer with Alabama Power, based at Plant Gaston.
Southern Company - Alabama Power won the Fortnightly Top Innovator 2025 award ''Mabel MacFerran Top Innovator in Energy Storage'' for its Concrete Thermal Energy Storage Demonstration Project.
PUF's Kerry Worthington: Please describe the innovation and its positive impact.
Josh Barron: The technology is concrete thermal energy storage, or CTES. This project was a demonstration at Alabama Power's Ernest C. Gaston Electric Generating Plant of a 2.5-megawatt system with four hours of storage — about ten megawatt hours total. It was the largest pilot of its kind in the world.
This technology was developed by Storworks Power, and the project was performed in collaboration with Southern Company and EPRI, with support from the U.S. Department of Energy.
The idea is simple: rather than turning a plant down during off-peak hours, it keeps operating efficiently, and the excess heat from that unit is stored in the concrete to be utilized later when peaking power is needed on the grid. This approach helps ensure a more reliable and cost-effective electricity supply for customers, especially during times of high demand.
Scott Machovec: Storworks has different variations in their technology, but this was a system formed with forty-two modular concrete blocks — about eighteen tons each — embedded with steam-carrying tubes.