Garma Energy lands $600K to build Canada's first thermal storage for direct air capture
What's the deal? Montreal-based Garma EnergyDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, a thermal energy storage developer, has secured $600,000 in backing from NorthX Climate TechDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → for a $1.4M project to deploy what it calls the world's first thermal energy storage system for direct air capture. The company is partnering with Deep Sky's Alpha project — a renewables-powered direct air capture (DAC) facility — to validate the technology in a real-world setting.
Why now? Industrial heat accounts for nearly a quarter of global energy consumption, most of it powered by fossil fuels. Low-cost renewables are increasingly available, but their intermittent nature limits reliability for industrial processes that need heat around the clock.
Garma's modular thermal energy storage systems aim to solve this by capturing excess renewable electricity and converting it into storable heat. When Deep Sky's DAC process doesn't need the electrons, they get redirected to Garma's system, which stores the energy as heat and releases it as steam on demand.
What could go wrong? The project is a first-of-its-kind deployment, which means unproven technology risk. Scaling modular thermal storage from pilot to commercial viability remains an open question, and the economics depend heavily on the availability and pricing of surplus renewable electricity.
The signal: Garma Energy is still at the early growth stage, but its partnership with Deep Sky — a breakout-stage carbon removal infrastructure company — gives it a credible path to commercial validation. NorthX Climate Tech, a government and non-profit investor, is backing the project, underscoring public-sector appetite for de-risking first-of-a-kind clean heat deployments that could unlock scalable carbon dioxide removal.
Read more: northx.ca
