Arcwell
Long-duration storage for industrial heat and power.
Overview
Arcwell stores energy as high-temperature heat in low-cost materials and returns it as process heat or power, decarbonising industrial sites that cannot electrify directly.
Hardware takes longer and costs more than software, and most support programs are built for neither. Arcwell has been in the network since 2020, through two prototypes and a first commercial plant.
What Stackpass unlocked
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01
Simulation before steel
Compute credits covered the thermal and materials simulation that let them iterate the system design in software rather than in fabrication.
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02
Industrial mentors, not software ones
The mentor network reached operators who had taken industrial systems from prototype to plant, which is a different discipline entirely.
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03
Patient capital introductions
Introductions were made only to funds who understood a hardware timeline, which took longer and worked better.
“Through a hard eighteen months they never once asked us to change the plan for optics. That kind of patience compounds.”