What about smaller units for houses? Is that feasible? It would be easier to implement than on a district level and I assume it could be placed underground like with a septic tank or in a utility room. On that note, could a small unit work along side a heat pump in a way where heat is retrieved during winter and then excess heat is stored during summer?
I love the interview and the technology. I’ve been researching thermal storage for industrial and district heating off and on for a while now. Conceptually, your engineering appears solid, innovative, and disruptive. That’s exactly what I like to see. I have a tremendous amount of questions concerning manufacturing, onsite assembly, cycle-rates, maintenance, scalability, and the reliability of your proposed systems. Hopefully, with the latest series of funding complete, the answers will be known before too long. See you at your IPO!
I think the key disconnect here is that most of us are looking for “round trip” efficiency from electricity to storage to electricity again. The figure quoted is just electricity to heat and holding that heat for up to one day. There is no converting this heat back to electricity discussed. This heat will be used directly in industrial application where heat is needed, not electricity. So this isn’t a “battery” in our common understanding but more an “efficient heat storage”.
@@benswilley7851 So for residential use cases it would be better to compare it to boilers? As in terms of how much energy it takes to heat a home, run a shower etc.
This is the first I have heard of Rondo Energy, so thank you for the introduction. However, I would like to hear more technical details about their heat storage battery. Pros: 1) off the shelf technologies 2) simple, long life materials 3) high output temperatures (compared to other heat storage technologies). I love this part of the solution. Cons: 1) I am *very* skeptical of the stated 98% storage efficiency mentioned at the start of the video. Usually, when talking about storage technology, people quote the "round trip efficiency", meaning, what percent of the input energy comes out durring discharge as *usable* energy. However, I suspect you are quoting the *charging* efficiency, meaning how much of the input energy is stored in the battery, ignoring how much energy is lost durring the extraction process. If you really do mean "round trip efficiency", then this statistic is so outlandish, it really is "too good to be true", and begs for justification and a heavy dose of skepticism. This would be astounding, and much higher than any of the other heat storage technologies. Lithium ion itself is typically stated to have 90% round trip storage effeciency, which is higher than any other heat energy storage technology that I am aware of. 2) There is no explanation of how the heat (ie, hot air?) used after it leaves the battery. I can imagine a few uses, but some solid real world examples would have been nice. 3) There is no talk about the ideal storage charge/discharge cycle time. Is this technology better suited to be used for short term (4 hour) medium term (8 to 12 hour) or long term (days/weeks) storage?
Hi Douglas! 1) The roundtrip efficiency of basically all electric thermal energy technologies will be in the 95%+ range. Rondo's roundtrip efficiency is 98%. Our system is designed to minimize environmental losses via insulation and recycling air. 2) The energy that leaves the system (hot air, superheated air, or steam) is sent into a facility's existing heat network. We're a plug-in replacement for existing gas-fired boilers that are using the same networks. Large heat loads and heat networks are common in the steel, cement, food & bev, chemical, low-carbon fuels, mining industries and beyond into non-industrial uses like district heating. 3) This is a long duration energy storage solution, the Rondo Heat Battery retains its charge for up to a day.
@@rondoenergy4228 hmm 1 day is probably not too usefull for private homes, but I could see its application in industry, aswell for powergrid fluctuations. As far as i know (in most cases) they use rotary batteries that rotate at high enough speeds to store energy and release it during powergrid fluctuations. Question ofc is: what's more efficient.
@@rondoenergy4228 How efficient would it be to go the other way and cool the bricks down? Warming things up is often needed, but cooling down also need a lot of energy. Food factories that need to flash freeze food could charge a "cold" battery at night with cheaper electricity for use in next day production or just use it as an accumulator that are cooled at a constant rate with a smaller cooler, then used in intervals when a batch of food need to be frozen.
Thanks for the detailed comment! To build on the response from Rondo, the reason the efficiency is so high is because inefficiencies usually come in the form of waste heat, however as this is a thermal battery, heat is what we are after! Therefore the heating elements are nearly 100% efficient, and as we require heat at the output there are no conversion losses there - all the losses come from heat loss, which is tightly controlled through dynamic and static insultation throughout the system! In summary, the fact energy is stored in the form we need it (heat) means it is very efficient, and there are very few conversion losses.
@@soundphile988 1 day is enough to cover the usual grid fluctuation. Overproduction or underproduction (assuming a balanced grid with enough wind power in relationship to solar power) over a week or multiple weeks is extremely rare, when speaking about a well integrated grid that spans across a continent (like europe for example). Usually there is overproduction or underproduction (on a grid scale level) for a few hours during the day. If you can balance that with a cheap storage method (like
Did I miss the part where the losses were discussed over that 12 hour period? What percentage of the stored heat is still available at the end of a 12 hour wait?
We deliver heat to our customers 24/7 at the temperatures / pressures / quantities demanded -- just like a gas-fired boiler would deliver. Except, we're non-combustion and CO2-free! We charge and discharge at the same time, and discharge 24/7, so the storage duration is long enough, and capacity large enough, to continuously provide our customers with power (without disruption).
@@isfren5482 It mentions that they have insulation, but doesn't touch on the actual losses at all, nor does the official company response above, so we can assume through their conspicuous omission that they must be pretty bad, unfortunately :-(
So it only works by also constantly extracting 120°C from it... which apparently is calculated as 100% efficient itself. And a storage duration of 12 hours means that it can only respond to very short term fluctuations, i.e. mostly day/night cycle. It might be a neat piece of technology that can be useful in quite a few places, but it's by no means the killer grid storage solution that makes other batteries obsolete. Most serious attempts at long term grid storage run below 70% efficiency because that's just the cost of affordable long term storage.
@@erseshe Except that it's really quite hard to get energy efficiently from said laser- you're lucky as heck if you can convert 1/4 of the energy to electricity using a system that barely produces as much energy in its lifespan as it took to manufacture in the first place.
@@erseshe clearly you know nothing about the efficiency of solar cells or pretty much anything. Also said laser burns non stop, 24hours a day. Not in 12 hour cycles as you implied.
@@erseshe What you say obviously sounds seductive, and to be honest, is basically correct, except for you forgot to talk about winter in the slightest. Not everywhere has bad winters, but where I live does. But like you said, 'quite a good option for many different places', but not where I live.
I have to say for all the people who have covered the topic you are the only one who actually went into the details of it & how it actually works & what is its USP
We need the electric-electric efficiency to compare to batteries there is no way that going to be 98%. This is electric to heat efficiency, the question is can you capture all that heat? And using air, isn't it going to create alot of NOx pollution?
Yes we can capture all the heat, and no we're not turning that heat back into electricity! Industry requires hot air or steam for many processes, most of which use natural gas today. Rondo eliminates scope 1 and 2 CO2 emissions and there are no NOx SOx or particulate emissions.
@Tony.... No we do not Because that's not the aim of Rondo. The comparison here is creating via natural gas or oil vs. Heat created by green electricity with a form of energy buffer (the rondo heat battery). As for the making of heat, rondo provides the link between a discontinuous energy provisioning and a continuous heat demand.
@@rondoenergy4228 I'm replying to the video author who is saying this (or is this actually a paid advertisement?), you cannot compare it to battery electrical storage, its not the same thing. Thermal energy has its uses as does electricity. You would not use battery storage for heating. Its better to store thermal energy for heating than use a battery, you get more kWh for less money, you havn't found any magic there, but I do hope you do well with it. What I object to is the video stating comparing thermal storage to a battery as if you can use thermal storage in the same way. Typical marketing rubbish. And how do you know there are NOx release, if air is involved and you are heating it to that temperature you are gonna make NOx.
I have a friend working on iron flow batteries which have the promise of being extremely cheap. Good to see people pointing out the ridiculousness of using lithium for grid scale installations.
Interesting, the use of simple materials to efficiently store bulk heat. Also, pairing this with the amazing TPV (solid-state heat-to-current) tech from MIT could be a winner.
Great video. How does this system compares to the thermal storage system by means of molten salts tanks that usually are installed in CSP generation plants?
Csp plants with molten salt storage are using that stored heat to drive a turbine to create electricity. The Rondo technology is delivering heat directly to a customer for use in high temperature industrial processes. A benefit here is footprint and energy density - with a molten salt system you’d need to transport heat over large distances because you can’t often site a large solar thermal installation onsite at a industrial facility - this would result in large heat losses. The rondo units use electricity to generate heat, which is much easier to transport, so the rondo units can be sited at an industrial facility right where the thermal energy is needed - replacing traditional gas fired boilers.
Dynamic insulation. The air that is cycled through the system surrounds the entire system -- so heat that "leaks" through the insulation is warming up air that is used -- this minimizes losses.
@@rondoenergy4228 This makes no sense at all. If you're 'cycling "air" through the system' the _"air"_ coming off the pile is already at temperature. It has to go back to whatever arc or plasma heating element your process uses and be brought _above_ the heat of the pile in order to shed heat into it. Whatever you're using to duct that gas has to be refractory with a higher melting point than silicon. Carbon perhaps? But any of these will be reactive with nitrogen and oxygen in "air"... Of course 3,000°F is too high for steel, and platinum is far too expensive to be used as a reflector so ultimately it is going to be radiating a lot of heat because of the high ∆. I don't need my sense of smell to know horse💩when I'm standing in it.
This is a thermal mass storage system, albeit a high temperature one. Such high temperatures are expensive to build and maintain, and inefficient as hell. There just isn't enough mass that can be positioned close enough to the intended use.
Ya, there's a problem with sand batteries otherwise we'd see more of them. I've been thinking about making a small system to store solar energy at the house but the math doesn't make sense
The bricks are the same as those used in the kilns of steel mills and have been designed to last for a very long time at high temperatures - John said this relates to over 100 years of expected use!
Probably also transportation though. This energy can be in deserts, wind farms, hydro or remote location nuclear plants...but we need to transport it. Maybe country wide, green energy powered wind tunnels/pipes...or water pipes. Recapture the energy in needed states/locations with turbines.
Just a quick comment after reading through the comments... This particular focus is industrial. This about taking cleanly produced electricity and converting it to heat and storing that heat. The heat is the desired 'product', for industrial processes. The high efficiency is due to not converting this heat to anything else. Industry currently using fossil fuel to create the heat, such as gas fired boilers for water and steam. This is a brilliant strategy, as industry are huge energy consumers. This is not for home use. Solutions for homes will come in other forms. To be clear, I no nothing of Rondo, or Mr O'Donnell, or the whole process, other than what I have seen here in this video. It seems many were not getting it, based on the comments. - Cheers
What heater material is used ?? I can imagine high temp alloy wires will oxidise . Ceramic elements might crack if cold, to be heated air , flows over them. But probably also oxidising or other processes on high temp will/can cause issues. How is that solved ?
You have no idea how entertaining this is. Especially because this is what you mentioned. One of the least efficient storage of energy out there. So yeah it make 'complete sense' to replicate this on bigger scale. lol What is even more funnier is fact that all of these 'revolutionaries' and 'inventors' race to re-invent the wheel when we already have heavily efficient energy storage that is proven and tested and allow au to 70-805 storage efficiency (some cases show up to 86%) But yeah lets waste time and effort on BS like this because fuck 'laws of thermodynamics' 😂
Thanks for this summary of Rondo's thermal-battery storage approach. With the double-stack approach, are you cutting your energy density in half, compared to Li-ion's ~260 wh/kg? It would be helpful to have a cost comparison between the Rondo system and Lithium, where Li-ion can be installed at say $100/kW and LiFePh can be installed at say $75/kW, with comparable lifetimes to Rondo, optimized by thermal management and controlling depth of discharge? For lower-temperature applications, like the district heating mentioned in your summary, the more detailed cost comparison should also include the use of heat-pumps with a high Coefficient of Performance of at least 5.
Sigh... This is heat storage, not electricity storage my dude. Get with the program. Your heat pump suggestion is ~useless for industrial processes as Heat pumps use the difference between evaporation and condensation temps/pressures. The cost of doing so at Temps/pressures required for industrial heating needs is insane so no, heat pumps are NOT viable for industrial heating.
There are several companies who have designed a similar system for home use! I suggest searching for "residential heat battery" -- they work similarly!
The last thing he said at the end of the vid seems the most dubious; fully insulated metropolitan-scale plumbing (for delivering any liquid or gas) would be required, doesn’t exist, and if it did would cost a fortune vs typical facilities
It's not storage of electricity, but storage of heat. You'd still need a turbine and generator (50% efficiency at best) to convert it back to electricity. It's very rare to transferring energy as heat.
Energy as heat account for ~25% of global CO2 emissions today! Not very rare at all! Our system is not deployed to generate electricity -- we're made for industrial heat storage for customers who require heat! In doing that, we can take power from the grid that would otherwise be curtailed during peak generation -- and instead of that clean green power being wasted, we can use it to replace gas use in industrial processes. A win-win for the grid and industrial customers who require 24/7 heat!
@@MrPhatties the rondo system is located where the existing boilers are located at a facility (they replace the boilers). So the heat is using the same heat network and not transferred over distances.
How much % does it lose per hour on average over 24 hours, assuming a max temp start? How many BTUs of heat can a single unit provide from max temp (full) to ambient temp (empty)?
The airflow around the battery never stops -- and if it does stop, the unit is no longer delivering power. In this case of required maintenance, there is no risk of thermal runaway, and we simply replace the air blower to ensure proper airflow.
Very well presented. Do be careful to keep your case-sensitive units correct. Kilowatt-hours per kilogramme is kWh/kg not KWH/KG, which would be Kelvin-Watt-Henry per Kelvin-Giga....
But the picture shows steel ingots in a soaking pit furnace in a forge shop or rolling mill. They have been heated with natural gas or even oil in some places.
My business partner lives in Stavanger and absolutely swears by triple glazing. He has ditched his air pump (ridiculously expensive apparently), insulated and invested in these windows. He can't stop raving about them and they seem to cope really well with Norwegian winters.
I’d be curious as to what gas they’re using for heat exchange. I did a project with the steam generators for gas cooled nuclear reactors so know high temperature chemistry can be weirdly counter intuitive sometimes
"20% of the cost" is sensible. "5 times cheaper", as the headline said, is gibberish. Once you are one times cheaper it's free. 5 times cheaper means that you are giving the customer 4 times the previous price along with the goods.
When you put it like that, I see what you mean! Maybe this is an English idiom (which are often gibberish) from where I am from, as it is said a lot here!
When you say "energy density equal to lithium ion batteries", you should specify if you mean energy density by *weight*, or energy density by *volume*.
You mentioned electric heating which is as far as I know almost 100% efficient in turning the electricity into heat but what about heat pumps? I'd assume they wouldn't be capable of reaching temperatures that high but I have no idea honestly.
So, a heat pump is just an application of transfer of energy. If you find the right material with the right properties, you could theoretically get from everyday temperatures to 1000 degrees, but I have no idea what that transfer material is. it may be a matter of finding a material we can compress enough to make the change.
Better! =] Liquid salt only reaches temperatures around 700C. Rondo more than doubles that. Our lifespan is also longer (50+ years with no degradation).
There are already companies today that sell heat batteries for home use! What we're doing is a bit more complex as they applications we're tackling are enormous in scale.
How well has the super heated salt worked out for solar? Sometimes things remain mostly as an idea because the reality isn't as smooth as the creators imagined
they in fairness explained why. solids create local hotspots and they do work but have slow discharge and upchrage due to this. This device has that problem solved.
High temp storage for industry, yes, but it won't be used for low temps like district heating. However you store the heat, you need to minimize entropy generation - so you'd use a heat pump as opposed to ohmic heating. For districts, the key is scale for long duration - rocks and water underground with no insulation, and locality for diurnal storage - dynamically responding to distribution bottlenecks in the heat network and short term intermittency in the grid, with insulated water tanks.
Heat pumps are expensive. While more efficient, the high capital costs mean you would want high utilization- which sometimes means consuming expensive electricity. Ohmic heating and bricks are cheap enough that you can consume electricity only when very cheap. Overall this can be more effective than heat pumps.
You wouldn’t do that with this technology. It will always be more efficient and lower cost to go from electricity-electricity instead of electricity-heat-electricity.
A storage system with a 98% efficiency with a fan and thermal energy as Core Elements… sure… I wonder why has no one has ever thought about it before?!
Because renewables are -- for the first time ever -- lower cost than fossil fuels in many markets around the world! This technology would not be feasible in the past with very low gas prices (and little environmental concern...)
Question: do you think a heat battery could be used to store heat from roads and then returned to the road to prevent ice forming, thus increasing the life span of the road and stopping the need to salt roads (the salt badly affects the nearby flora and fish)? If so, which would be better: sand, rondo or another I haven't heard of?
But we already do, at lower temperatures. Oils, salts and water are widely used to store heat in various size solar heat capturing systems, like the accumulator tank you would have for your house or a molten salt storage for a concentrated solar plant. The new thing here seems to be the radiated heat distribution, which allows using temperatures above the melting point of most metals, apart from tungsten. Since tungsten would be expensive, a cheaper ceramic is used, but since this wouldn't directly conduct heat very well, radiation is used to charge it up and convection is used to discharge it. This is in fact NOT entirely different from a brick house being heated up by a fireplace and releasing the heat slowly back out for your comfort. Just higher temps, since driving out CO2 from limestone takes a lot more effort than keeping a human comfortable. Also, since it takes electricity in rather than heat, it has been waiting for green energy to become cheap enough that it could finally compete with fossil fuels. Great idea, all in all. Now let's see it transform these gas-burning industries like fertilizer and cement production.
Tetrad20: Except that using electricity to make heat is expensive, and we burn fossil fuels to create electricity. It is far more efficient to use that fossil fuel to make the heat required in these industrial processes. Now with creating the electricity with greener methods, using it to create the heat desired makes more practical sense. Remember, heat is the 'product' we are after, in this case.
@@rondoenergy4228 Check my answer to Tetrad20, and let me know if I am understanding your goal and direction. I have no knowledge of your company or process, but from this video it made instant sense to me. That is if I am getting it correctly. - Cheers
Am I the only one that when seeing these types of videos to get a smile on my face ? It later comes with thoughts a d doubts on how are they are going to achieve a much cheaper and efficient way to power something but also if they exist at all and they are not just a fake company trying to just milk money from investors and whatsoever. I hope they achieve their goal.
Sensible thermal energy storage is nothing new. This concept is kinda cheap to make and easy to scale in means of pure heat storage. However there are some bottlenecks using an air as the heat transportation medium. 1) Air is very bad in conducting heat, so the heat exchanger between air /steam (or whatever medium) has high requirements for the heat trasfer area and this doesnt scale well, especially if you talk about heat power > 1 MW. 2) Hot air has very low density (>1 kg/m3) so it is no joke to make it move in some higher quantities. 3) using closed air loop meaning that the blower inlet has also higher temperature and there is same problem as in 2. point. I think this concept has a good potential for just pure power to heat applications, but unfortunetally it is not so good for power to heat to power applications.
I'm a bit sceptical on the high efficiency and duration claimed. Temperature is conducted in three ways: Direct conduction (on contact), convection, and radiation. Direct conduction can be avoided best by "air-gapping" the materials, or even better by "vacuum-gapping" like in Dewar vessels. Convection can be avoided by vacuum, too, or by materials that would significantly restrict the ability of the surrounding gas to move (like in styrofoam or glass wool). However, at these temperatures, a major part of the heat is already transferred by radiation, i.e., infrared and visible light. And a good part of the emission is already in the red and yellow visible light. To accommodate for that, and for longevity, the inner walls of the insulator would have to be plated with gold, as other feasible metals (e.g. silver, as also used for Dewar vessels, or aluminium) would degrade too quickly under these harsh conditions. But the walls can't be made out of normal glass, because it would already get soft at temperatures > 1000°C. So a special glass, or even more expensive materials (like quartz or ceramics) would be needed. That significantly contributes to the cost, especially when considering the enormous areas that needed to be covered for a feasible storage of heat. And probably a single layer of insulation would not suffice. Besides that, the material is under enormous mechanical stress. Microscopic cracks would be the consequence, and thus, either frequent maintenance or heat loss. I don't say this can't work, I'm just a bit sceptical on the claimed numbers for efficiency and use cycles.
The heat that 'leaks' through the inner wall of the radiation chamber is surrounded by the air that will be blown back through the system and recycled, so there is very minimal heat loss.
@@concon424 ah, so it discharges while being charged? That's of course not a waste... 🤣 Btw. the patent only says "Heat from the solid medium is delivered continuously on demand.", not "while charging". And the so-called "dynamic insulation" is only a pre-heater for the gas to discharge the heat.
Rhondo, you may be to late... there is a system that DOES NOT require the Rankin Cycle. At what scale Mw/BTU have you generated at? I do like your concept, best of luck and Godspeed.
I would be extremely interested to see how well this scales down for the use of heat in smallscale industry. Ceramics and metalworking, the potential applications are significant.
It scales only for Home Use. This type of Heating was popular before the Oil Crisis of the 70s in Germany, and is Popular again today. It is not as efficient, as fossile fuels - but if you make use of cheaper nightly energy tariffs, you can basically charge these bois up "over night" ; and then let them dissipate their heat over the course of the day. For large scale, this is , however, obviously idiotic.
So this is not a ‘battery’ in the conmon sense, but a Power-to-heat solution that can store heat for 1 day and delivers heat in form of steam, Super hot air etc to industries or other heat demanding users.
I can appreciate the benefits of storing energy cheaply as heat. However, I wonder if there is a trend that will limit the scope. I notice that the 'Off-Peak' electricity prices are going up faster than the 'Peak' prices. Will the coming demand for power for EV recharging, cause an increase in this trend so there will be little difference between peak and off-peak prices?
The more renewables that are put on the grid the more peak generation there will be and lower costs. EVs will take advantage of that but the reality is a lot of people will be charging at night, along with using heat/AC/lights etc in their homes. So solar will always need to be sized up to account for storage needed to satisfying nighttime demand, and that power will always be more expensive. Peak solar generation today sometimes must be curtailed - a technology like this avoids curtailment while tackling the toughest emissions from industry.
@@concon424 "So solar will always need to be sized up to account for storage needed to satisfying nighttime demand," I'm not clear ... Are you meaning that "STORAGE must be increased to run 'heat/AC/lights'". If there was enough storage now there would be no need for curtailment now. I have a couple of DIY battery banks (30kWh) and I know the costs and savings. However, I suspect that industrial scale batteries may be much more expensive (I read it was ~900% more). Do you anticipate that EVs will mainly be charged around mid-day on sunny days?
@@SandyMcClintock if they are not charged at midday they do not accomplish the Mission to exist : Balance the Electric grid and give the possibility to install more PV vithout waste Energy in peak hours . This should be the magic of EVs .
Ending battery storage means no batteries in phones, none in EVs... This stuff will replace some battery storage... It cannot fill all applications, not even all industrial heat applications and that is only a small part of all storage that is needed. A lot of electrical storage needs to be able to be used within milliseconds in order to balance the grid. If we need to spin up steam turbines the moment that balancing is needed, the electricity will flow too late for those applications...
Very awesome I would love to see you cover about the uses of Graphene that could be used in radiators for both on earth and space because of it being about 10 times more better than water cooling and 25 times less energy I believe tho I can't remember fullu but I do study a ton of science and stuff from new atlas, business insider, undecided with mat farewell, and more tho I would like you to cover from what I said of graphene that could be used for both on earth and space including maybe other small things and stuff like electronics and things. Thanks for the video, the quality is great, wish your channel was larger in terms of subscribers you deserve it!
Sigh... blatantly NO! Radiation goes by its black body radiation constant. Emmissivity constant. Graphene is not all that great at either absorbing or emitting. You are thinking about thermal conductivity, not radiation.
Just like the ancient pyramids were exactly like our old analogue systems where the Antarctica and the desert were used as two opposing fields of cold and heat connected to the centre of earth to send signals through the dimensions of space that’s exactly how this works
This still runs into the same issue as Polar Night. The amount of energy you would need to get it up to temp is massive. To heat a decent sized city of 100K, you'd need something like a megawatt nuclear reactor to provide all the electricity needed for heating the bricks... in which case, why not just use the electricity, which has very little transmission loss, to power electrical radiators? I don't get it... we're trying anything and everything to produce and store power when we should be looking at nuclear which can power everything and doesn't need storage... Nuclear is green. Nuclear is clean. Nuclear lasts a helluva long time. Plus Fission can power Fusion, which will undoubtedly be the power supply of the future.
Well, the accidents made people very scared. The strategy, really, should be showing nuclear energy kills a lot less people per plant than any plants that burn stuff. As far as I'm aware it kills orders of magnitude less people than plants that burn stuff for energy. That just the way to reframe. And, yes, the nuclear waste isn't really solved, but burning fuel also won't make a dent on global warming which is a bigger looming threat.
@@VeteranVandal There is somewhat a solve for the waste. There's actually two solutions. The first is thorium reactors. You can take the spent fuels from uranium reactors and burn them in thorium reactors which will reduce them more, which take the half-life from a few thousand years to a hundred years or so. After a few generations, the waste would no longer be a health risk. The second solution is diamond batteries. They'd encase the spent fuels within synthetic diamonds and use the beta decay to provide very low, but very long-term power. I'm going off of memory here, so the details may be off a smidge, but generally speaking, we do have solutions and they do work. Edit: Diamond batteries are safe... thought I'd mention that.
Nuclear is clean and green?!?! Hanford in Washington State just started vitrification of untold barrels of decades-old liquid nuclear waste. Tell THEM how “clean and green” your beloved nuclear energy is! 😡
There's no energy free lunch with either 'green' wind/solar or nuclear ... just swapping one set of environmental issues for another. I'm reminded of the astronaut who said of the space shuttle 'you're sitting on a bomb with over ten thousand components ... all manufactured by the cheapest bidder'. 😉
@@rondoenergy4228 generated with electricity instead of being created on demand by gas needing additional hardware. So this scheme is beneficial if you can score electricity cheaper than the cost for fuel correct? So this could be expressed in hours per year where this scenario takes place. Is it hundreds or thousands of hours? Turning electricity into heat is not a value prop by itself you got to also beat heatpumps that give at least tripple the heat for the same amount of energy but can't reach these Temps obviously
"where heating is required" Storing heat is not the same as storing electricity. You cannot move heat instantly to point of use, turn a heat pump or charge an EV. Moving heat at 1000-1500C for smelting, ciment is extremely hard, how do you pump heat, what are the pipes, most materials break down at these temperatures. etc. Still a good way to use excess solar energy that is going to become more and more common. (unless EV batteries can use it)
Industrial plants already have heat networks they use to move heat around to multiple end uses at their facilities. The Rondo unit replaces gas fired boilers that are already being used on the facility’s heat network.
Lead would be a far better medium for storing heat, because of its relatively low melting temperature, high density, and the fact that a transition of phase is the best way to get a lot more crammed in, with solid-to-liquid being the best one.
I am a bit confused. Is this system storing electricity like a Lithium battery or heat? A Lithium battery stores electricity that can be used for any electrical application. This system seems to only store heat that can only be used as heat. I don't see how you can say it will "end battery storage". First, sufficient electrical power must be generated in a large enough volume to heat a large pile of bricks to 3,000 degrees. Well, what kind of power generator is this? When the heat is depleted what replaces it? We are talking about heat at kiln-like temperatures. What do you do with that kind of heat? Perhaps it would be useful in industry but this heat storage would have to be very close to the point of usage. Am I missing something?
Title should read "...will end up to one third of stationary battery storage"... Far from killing battery storage... I gotta downvote and select "do not recommend channel" for the sensationalistic title... The crazy title trend I have had enough of, and there is no end to the videos that have reasonable titles covering the same subjects so I do not miss out on anything as a result... Yes, I know this interaction still helps the popularity of this video... Just letting you know why the downvote since so many creators seem obsessed with every downvote and I am not trying to cause such distress...
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We supply heat to heavy industry. There may be cases where electricity would be delivered too -- but heat is the primary form of energy our customers are seeking.
Nice to see this question. It's one of the many i had for this solution and seeing domeone else asking this, makes me happy. There is also a question about unstable temperature, regulation mechanisms, continuous heating up and cooling "bricks"? How many cycles can this material withstand? Can it be cooled completly or is there a special "usable" range? Just a few off the top of my head...
@@concon424 OK, nice. Discharging into what? If there is no need for the power at this moment, battery is getting charged, where does it discharge? Does that insulating air flow through the battery all of the time?
What are the bricks made of? I take it nothing specially rare as eluded to. But what makes bricks that different than sand? Is it just the increase in density?
@Thunderf00t seems like an issue when you need to heat things very hot. Only the top 50% can be used to heat to 1500C from a 3000C battery. Bye efficiency
Storing energy has always been the biggest problem. The reason we drive gasoline powered cars is because gasoline has the best energy to wait ratio of the time. The gas tank is the storage device.
It was an absolute pleasure speaking with you! Thank you for telling the story of industrial decarbonization via electric thermal energy storage.
This sounds good, but do you have a pilot? Also, dunkelflaute. Great word.
What about smaller units for houses? Is that feasible? It would be easier to implement than on a district level and I assume it could be placed underground like with a septic tank or in a utility room.
On that note, could a small unit work along side a heat pump in a way where heat is retrieved during winter and then excess heat is stored during summer?
I love the interview and the technology. I’ve been researching thermal storage for industrial and district heating off and on for a while now. Conceptually, your engineering appears solid, innovative, and disruptive. That’s exactly what I like to see. I have a tremendous amount of questions concerning manufacturing, onsite assembly, cycle-rates, maintenance, scalability, and the reliability of your proposed systems. Hopefully, with the latest series of funding complete, the answers will be known before too long. See you at your IPO!
I think the key disconnect here is that most of us are looking for “round trip” efficiency from electricity to storage to electricity again. The figure quoted is just electricity to heat and holding that heat for up to one day.
There is no converting this heat back to electricity discussed. This heat will be used directly in industrial application where heat is needed, not electricity.
So this isn’t a “battery” in our common understanding but more an “efficient heat storage”.
@@benswilley7851 So for residential use cases it would be better to compare it to boilers? As in terms of how much energy it takes to heat a home, run a shower etc.
This is the first I have heard of Rondo Energy, so thank you for the introduction. However, I would like to hear more technical details about their heat storage battery.
Pros: 1) off the shelf technologies 2) simple, long life materials 3) high output temperatures (compared to other heat storage technologies). I love this part of the solution.
Cons:
1) I am *very* skeptical of the stated 98% storage efficiency mentioned at the start of the video. Usually, when talking about storage technology, people quote the "round trip efficiency", meaning, what percent of the input energy comes out durring discharge as *usable* energy. However, I suspect you are quoting the *charging* efficiency, meaning how much of the input energy is stored in the battery, ignoring how much energy is lost durring the extraction process.
If you really do mean "round trip efficiency", then this statistic is so outlandish, it really is "too good to be true", and begs for justification and a heavy dose of skepticism. This would be astounding, and much higher than any of the other heat storage technologies. Lithium ion itself is typically stated to have 90% round trip storage effeciency, which is higher than any other heat energy storage technology that I am aware of.
2) There is no explanation of how the heat (ie, hot air?) used after it leaves the battery. I can imagine a few uses, but some solid real world examples would have been nice.
3) There is no talk about the ideal storage charge/discharge cycle time. Is this technology better suited to be used for short term (4 hour) medium term (8 to 12 hour) or long term (days/weeks) storage?
Hi Douglas!
1) The roundtrip efficiency of basically all electric thermal energy technologies will be in the 95%+ range. Rondo's roundtrip efficiency is 98%. Our system is designed to minimize environmental losses via insulation and recycling air.
2) The energy that leaves the system (hot air, superheated air, or steam) is sent into a facility's existing heat network. We're a plug-in replacement for existing gas-fired boilers that are using the same networks. Large heat loads and heat networks are common in the steel, cement, food & bev, chemical, low-carbon fuels, mining industries and beyond into non-industrial uses like district heating.
3) This is a long duration energy storage solution, the Rondo Heat Battery retains its charge for up to a day.
@@rondoenergy4228 hmm 1 day is probably not too usefull for private homes, but I could see its application in industry, aswell for powergrid fluctuations. As far as i know (in most cases) they use rotary batteries that rotate at high enough speeds to store energy and release it during powergrid fluctuations. Question ofc is: what's more efficient.
@@rondoenergy4228 How efficient would it be to go the other way and cool the bricks down?
Warming things up is often needed, but cooling down also need a lot of energy. Food factories that need to flash freeze food could charge a "cold" battery at night with cheaper electricity for use in next day production or just use it as an accumulator that are cooled at a constant rate with a smaller cooler, then used in intervals when a batch of food need to be frozen.
Thanks for the detailed comment!
To build on the response from Rondo, the reason the efficiency is so high is because inefficiencies usually come in the form of waste heat, however as this is a thermal battery, heat is what we are after! Therefore the heating elements are nearly 100% efficient, and as we require heat at the output there are no conversion losses there - all the losses come from heat loss, which is tightly controlled through dynamic and static insultation throughout the system!
In summary, the fact energy is stored in the form we need it (heat) means it is very efficient, and there are very few conversion losses.
@@soundphile988 1 day is enough to cover the usual grid fluctuation. Overproduction or underproduction (assuming a balanced grid with enough wind power in relationship to solar power) over a week or multiple weeks is extremely rare, when speaking about a well integrated grid that spans across a continent (like europe for example). Usually there is overproduction or underproduction (on a grid scale level) for a few hours during the day. If you can balance that with a cheap storage method (like
Did I miss the part where the losses were discussed over that 12 hour period? What percentage of the stored heat is still available at the end of a 12 hour wait?
We deliver heat to our customers 24/7 at the temperatures / pressures / quantities demanded -- just like a gas-fired boiler would deliver. Except, we're non-combustion and CO2-free! We charge and discharge at the same time, and discharge 24/7, so the storage duration is long enough, and capacity large enough, to continuously provide our customers with power (without disruption).
@@rondoenergy4228 I like how you didn't answer a simple question, indicating a lot of energy loss. If anyone asks I'll say it's 50% per 6 hours
@@RN1441 Yep, yet another renewable energy startup to scam venture capital.
@@RN1441 yo is this what you looking for 6:30
@@isfren5482 It mentions that they have insulation, but doesn't touch on the actual losses at all, nor does the official company response above, so we can assume through their conspicuous omission that they must be pretty bad, unfortunately :-(
8 minute video and I still haven't heard why heating bricks is suddenly revolutionary
Yeah, just a marketing ad
yeah the bloke is interviewing the CEO of the company lol like he would say anything else than spectacular @@generalengineerph3574
Only because we used it, forgot about it and are now realising it could fix our modern day storage problem.
It's nice for high temperature applications in different industries
So it only works by also constantly extracting 120°C from it... which apparently is calculated as 100% efficient itself.
And a storage duration of 12 hours means that it can only respond to very short term fluctuations, i.e. mostly day/night cycle.
It might be a neat piece of technology that can be useful in quite a few places, but it's by no means the killer grid storage solution that makes other batteries obsolete.
Most serious attempts at long term grid storage run below 70% efficiency because that's just the cost of affordable long term storage.
Math is hard these days, hence all the FTX investors who lost all their money.
@@erseshe Except that it's really quite hard to get energy efficiently from said laser- you're lucky as heck if you can convert 1/4 of the energy to electricity using a system that barely produces as much energy in its lifespan as it took to manufacture in the first place.
@@erseshe clearly you know nothing about the efficiency of solar cells or pretty much anything. Also said laser burns non stop, 24hours a day. Not in 12 hour cycles as you implied.
where did grid slip into this ? it's a thermal battery for thermal outputs as heated air or steam ....
@@erseshe What you say obviously sounds seductive, and to be honest, is basically correct, except for you forgot to talk about winter in the slightest. Not everywhere has bad winters, but where I live does. But like you said, 'quite a good option for many different places', but not where I live.
I have to say for all the people who have covered the topic you are the only one who actually went into the details of it & how it actually works & what is its USP
We need the electric-electric efficiency to compare to batteries there is no way that going to be 98%. This is electric to heat efficiency, the question is can you capture all that heat? And using air, isn't it going to create alot of NOx pollution?
Yes we can capture all the heat, and no we're not turning that heat back into electricity! Industry requires hot air or steam for many processes, most of which use natural gas today. Rondo eliminates scope 1 and 2 CO2 emissions and there are no NOx SOx or particulate emissions.
@@rondoenergy4228 You guys are genuinely heroes for figuring out serious ways to reduce industrial reliance on natural gas.
@Tony.... No we do not
Because that's not the aim of Rondo. The comparison here is creating via natural gas or oil vs. Heat created by green electricity with a form of energy buffer (the rondo heat battery).
As for the making of heat, rondo provides the link between a discontinuous energy provisioning and a continuous heat demand.
@@rondoenergy4228 I'm replying to the video author who is saying this (or is this actually a paid advertisement?), you cannot compare it to battery electrical storage, its not the same thing. Thermal energy has its uses as does electricity. You would not use battery storage for heating. Its better to store thermal energy for heating than use a battery, you get more kWh for less money, you havn't found any magic there, but I do hope you do well with it. What I object to is the video stating comparing thermal storage to a battery as if you can use thermal storage in the same way. Typical marketing rubbish.
And how do you know there are NOx release, if air is involved and you are heating it to that temperature you are gonna make NOx.
I have a friend working on iron flow batteries which have the promise of being extremely cheap. Good to see people pointing out the ridiculousness of using lithium for grid scale installations.
Interesting, the use of simple materials to efficiently store bulk heat. Also, pairing this with the amazing TPV (solid-state heat-to-current) tech from MIT could be a winner.
What?? No. TPV is at best 40-50% efficient. Thermal energy storage is only useful for industrial heat applications. It will not replace batteries.
@@jameswatkins7763 yes, silly me, I missed the main point of converting surplus grid power to stored heat for local use.
@@sequitor heat from burning is still cheaper
¡Gracias!
So impressive, your video quality has skyrocketed. 55k subs. Astounding mate. Keep it up, I use your vids in my engineering circles.
Glad you have noticed the extra work, and thanks for the long-term support!
Powered by clickbait.
Grow up your engineering circles.
That's pretty awesome :-D Battery storage is literally the most limiting factor right now, in freeing humanity from mundane tasks....
Once fossil fuels run out, energy storage is a technology that will be a major factor in how many humans earth can support.
Underated channel. Love the content, keep it coming champ!
Thank you!
Great video. How does this system compares to the thermal storage system by means of molten salts tanks that usually are installed in CSP generation plants?
Csp plants with molten salt storage are using that stored heat to drive a turbine to create electricity. The Rondo technology is delivering heat directly to a customer for use in high temperature industrial processes. A benefit here is footprint and energy density - with a molten salt system you’d need to transport heat over large distances because you can’t often site a large solar thermal installation onsite at a industrial facility - this would result in large heat losses. The rondo units use electricity to generate heat, which is much easier to transport, so the rondo units can be sited at an industrial facility right where the thermal energy is needed - replacing traditional gas fired boilers.
Molten salt freezes in the pipes when the plant shuts down, huge mess, always a bad idea. Only works in nuclear.
How do they insulate the heating chamber so well? I can't see how you can store such high heats without losing a lot of it to the environment.
Dynamic insulation. The air that is cycled through the system surrounds the entire system -- so heat that "leaks" through the insulation is warming up air that is used -- this minimizes losses.
@@rondoenergy4228 This makes no sense at all.
If you're 'cycling "air" through the system' the _"air"_ coming off the pile is already at temperature.
It has to go back to whatever arc or plasma heating element your process uses and be brought _above_ the heat of the pile in order to shed heat into it.
Whatever you're using to duct that gas has to be refractory with a higher melting point than silicon. Carbon perhaps? But any of these will be reactive with nitrogen and oxygen in "air"...
Of course 3,000°F is too high for steel, and platinum is far too expensive to be used as a reflector so ultimately it is going to be radiating a lot of heat because of the high ∆.
I don't need my sense of smell to know horse💩when I'm standing in it.
So they took a Russian stove, increased in size alittle and replaced the heat source from combustible materials to electricity.
This is a thermal mass storage system, albeit a high temperature one. Such high temperatures are expensive to build and maintain, and inefficient as hell. There just isn't enough mass that can be positioned close enough to the intended use.
You wouldn’t know
suck on it
@@timcarsondalat
Ya, there's a problem with sand batteries otherwise we'd see more of them. I've been thinking about making a small system to store solar energy at the house but the math doesn't make sense
How are they going to protect the bricks from crumbling under thermal cycling ?
The bricks are the same as those used in the kilns of steel mills and have been designed to last for a very long time at high temperatures - John said this relates to over 100 years of expected use!
This is what we should be thinking about. Clean energy storage is the question of this era.
Probably also transportation though. This energy can be in deserts, wind farms, hydro or remote location nuclear plants...but we need to transport it. Maybe country wide, green energy powered wind tunnels/pipes...or water pipes. Recapture the energy in needed states/locations with turbines.
Just a quick comment after reading through the comments...
This particular focus is industrial. This about taking cleanly produced electricity and converting it to heat and storing that heat. The heat is the desired 'product', for industrial processes.
The high efficiency is due to not converting this heat to anything else. Industry currently using fossil fuel to create the heat, such as gas fired boilers for water and steam. This is a brilliant strategy, as industry are huge energy consumers. This is not for home use. Solutions for homes will come in other forms.
To be clear, I no nothing of Rondo, or Mr O'Donnell, or the whole process, other than what I have seen here in this video. It seems many were not getting it, based on the comments. - Cheers
Thanks, yes you nailed it! Seems many folks comment without watching the video, or at least absorbing it!
Okay, so why does the weight of this thing matter so much, it's a static facility.
It the mass. BIG mass = BIG BTU storage.
What heater material is used ?? I can imagine high temp alloy wires will oxidise . Ceramic elements might crack if cold, to be heated air , flows over them.
But probably also oxidising or other processes on high temp will/can cause issues.
How is that solved ?
Interesting video which might have further applications. I don't think (m)any systems have used radiative energy to smooth uneven heating problems.
How is this different from taking an electric ceramics kiln, filling it with bricks and hooking it up to solar/wind?
This actually makes a lot of sense, as it's basically how storage heaters work.
You have no idea how entertaining this is. Especially because this is what you mentioned. One of the least efficient storage of energy out there. So yeah it make 'complete sense' to replicate this on bigger scale. lol
What is even more funnier is fact that all of these 'revolutionaries' and 'inventors' race to re-invent the wheel when we already have heavily efficient energy storage that is proven and tested and allow au to 70-805 storage efficiency (some cases show up to 86%)
But yeah lets waste time and effort on BS like this because fuck 'laws of thermodynamics' 😂
Rondo has what heat needs, Electrolytes
Thanks for this summary of Rondo's thermal-battery storage approach.
With the double-stack approach, are you cutting your energy density in half, compared to Li-ion's ~260 wh/kg?
It would be helpful to have a cost comparison between the Rondo system and Lithium, where Li-ion can be installed at say $100/kW and LiFePh can be installed at say $75/kW, with comparable lifetimes to Rondo, optimized by thermal management and controlling depth of discharge?
For lower-temperature applications, like the district heating mentioned in your summary, the more detailed cost comparison should also include the use of heat-pumps with a high Coefficient of Performance of at least 5.
Sigh... This is heat storage, not electricity storage my dude. Get with the program. Your heat pump suggestion is ~useless for industrial processes as Heat pumps use the difference between evaporation and condensation temps/pressures. The cost of doing so at Temps/pressures required for industrial heating needs is insane so no, heat pumps are NOT viable for industrial heating.
Very pretty but just more vaporware. Be interested to see if they even exist in a year.
Rondo has what plants crave
This was my Concept for a House in aprox 2010, I Envisioned a Large Cubic Sand Battery to last through winter, done some Calculations Too!
There are several companies who have designed a similar system for home use! I suggest searching for "residential heat battery" -- they work similarly!
Rondo. It’s got what plants need.
The last thing he said at the end of the vid seems the most dubious; fully insulated metropolitan-scale plumbing (for delivering any liquid or gas) would be required, doesn’t exist, and if it did would cost a fortune vs typical facilities
Now THIS is accessible to MANY.
It's not storage of electricity, but storage of heat. You'd still need a turbine and generator (50% efficiency at best) to convert it back to electricity. It's very rare to transferring energy as heat.
Energy as heat account for ~25% of global CO2 emissions today! Not very rare at all! Our system is not deployed to generate electricity -- we're made for industrial heat storage for customers who require heat! In doing that, we can take power from the grid that would otherwise be curtailed during peak generation -- and instead of that clean green power being wasted, we can use it to replace gas use in industrial processes. A win-win for the grid and industrial customers who require 24/7 heat!
@@rondoenergy4228 not transmitted though. That is energy converted into heat, not heat moved where it's generated to where it's needed
@@MrPhatties the rondo system is located where the existing boilers are located at a facility (they replace the boilers). So the heat is using the same heat network and not transferred over distances.
@@concon424 yes but the number of use cases for temporary storage of heat is pretty limited compared to storage of electricity.
How much % does it lose per hour on average over 24 hours, assuming a max temp start? How many BTUs of heat can a single unit provide from max temp (full) to ambient temp (empty)?
Very clever. What happens if air flow around the battery stops?
The airflow around the battery never stops -- and if it does stop, the unit is no longer delivering power. In this case of required maintenance, there is no risk of thermal runaway, and we simply replace the air blower to ensure proper airflow.
Very well presented. Do be careful to keep your case-sensitive units correct. Kilowatt-hours per kilogramme is kWh/kg not KWH/KG, which would be Kelvin-Watt-Henry per Kelvin-Giga....
That is a good spot and made me chuckle ahah! I used a font that is all in capitals without thinking, I will make sure to change that in the future!
😅
But the picture shows steel ingots in a soaking pit furnace in a forge shop or rolling mill. They have been heated with natural gas or even oil in some places.
In Finland it is customary to use three layered windows. The caps are filled with argon gas.
A few building here in England are starting to use triple glazing actually to meet the best insulation standards!
My business partner lives in Stavanger and absolutely swears by triple glazing. He has ditched his air pump (ridiculously expensive apparently), insulated and invested in these windows.
He can't stop raving about them and they seem to cope really well with Norwegian winters.
I’d be curious as to what gas they’re using for heat exchange. I did a project with the steam generators for gas cooled nuclear reactors so know high temperature chemistry can be weirdly counter intuitive sometimes
"20% of the cost" is sensible. "5 times cheaper", as the headline said, is gibberish. Once you are one times cheaper it's free. 5 times cheaper means that you are giving the customer 4 times the previous price along with the goods.
When you put it like that, I see what you mean! Maybe this is an English idiom (which are often gibberish) from where I am from, as it is said a lot here!
Nice, glad we are innovating. Goodjob Rondo!
When you say "energy density equal to lithium ion batteries", you should specify if you mean energy density by *weight*, or energy density by *volume*.
Yes that was my bad! It is gravimetric energy density.
has this approach been used with a Sterling engine to create electricity?
You mentioned electric heating which is as far as I know almost 100% efficient in turning the electricity into heat but what about heat pumps? I'd assume they wouldn't be capable of reaching temperatures that high but I have no idea honestly.
So, a heat pump is just an application of transfer of energy. If you find the right material with the right properties, you could theoretically get from everyday temperatures to 1000 degrees, but I have no idea what that transfer material is. it may be a matter of finding a material we can compress enough to make the change.
Humm an echo chamber full of hot air. I wonder if this principle could be applied to Reddit
Excellent video.
how does this compare to Ambri's liquid salt batteries?
Better! =] Liquid salt only reaches temperatures around 700C. Rondo more than doubles that. Our lifespan is also longer (50+ years with no degradation).
This sounds like such a promising technology!! And amazing video as always
How’s the progress on this 1 year later? I’m not seeing them in any solar or wind farms. Why?
This is the kind of ingenuity needed for solving energy storage! Great video, and thanks for sharing!
Not really. just glorified storage heaters and pretty likely to fail.
Thanks , please can this be adapted for home use ?
There are already companies today that sell heat batteries for home use! What we're doing is a bit more complex as they applications we're tackling are enormous in scale.
How well has the super heated salt worked out for solar? Sometimes things remain mostly as an idea because the reality isn't as smooth as the creators imagined
they in fairness explained why. solids create local hotspots and they do work but have slow discharge and upchrage due to this. This device has that problem solved.
Kudos to you. Industrial processes are the largest segment of FF use. And the waste heat is very usable.
High temp storage for industry, yes, but it won't be used for low temps like district heating.
However you store the heat, you need to minimize entropy generation - so you'd use a heat pump as opposed to ohmic heating.
For districts, the key is scale for long duration - rocks and water underground with no insulation, and locality for diurnal storage - dynamically responding to distribution bottlenecks in the heat network and short term intermittency in the grid, with insulated water tanks.
Heat pumps are expensive. While more efficient, the high capital costs mean you would want high utilization- which sometimes means consuming expensive electricity. Ohmic heating and bricks are cheap enough that you can consume electricity only when very cheap.
Overall this can be more effective than heat pumps.
How would you construct a phased array of transducer to track acoustically the object?
Just reverse the polarity of the neutron flow
What’s the equivalent battery efficiency if you use the steam to run a turbine and generate electricity?
You wouldn’t do that with this technology. It will always be more efficient and lower cost to go from electricity-electricity instead of electricity-heat-electricity.
Something like 40-50%
A storage system with a 98% efficiency with a fan and thermal energy as Core Elements… sure… I wonder why has no one has ever thought about it before?!
Because renewables are -- for the first time ever -- lower cost than fossil fuels in many markets around the world! This technology would not be feasible in the past with very low gas prices (and little environmental concern...)
Nice, I find it very interesting and easy to listen to your presentation.
Novel and innovative idea, something to look out for in the near future!
Question: do you think a heat battery could be used to store heat from roads and then returned to the road to prevent ice forming, thus increasing the life span of the road and stopping the need to salt roads (the salt badly affects the nearby flora and fish)? If so, which would be better: sand, rondo or another I haven't heard of?
Maybe from a solar "freaking" roadway =] for those OG youtube viewers out there!
@@rondoenergy4228 didn't that project fail miserably?
LOL
You can't...and if you thought before typing you wouldn't ask.
@@AKUJIVALDO way to be a dick, congrats
@@AKUJIVALDO Sadly it isnt the end of solar roads, you still see them pop up from time to time.
What are the bricks made out of
Refractory brick
My first thought is, if this idea is good and cheap with little or no drawbacks, we'd already be using it everywhere.
Our company is only 2 years old! We hope to scale quickly =] Stay tuned for upcoming customer announcements.
Can I use it to heat my camper? No, but I could use solar if I could afford it.
But we already do, at lower temperatures. Oils, salts and water are widely used to store heat in various size solar heat capturing systems, like the accumulator tank you would have for your house or a molten salt storage for a concentrated solar plant.
The new thing here seems to be the radiated heat distribution, which allows using temperatures above the melting point of most metals, apart from tungsten. Since tungsten would be expensive, a cheaper ceramic is used, but since this wouldn't directly conduct heat very well, radiation is used to charge it up and convection is used to discharge it. This is in fact NOT entirely different from a brick house being heated up by a fireplace and releasing the heat slowly back out for your comfort. Just higher temps, since driving out CO2 from limestone takes a lot more effort than keeping a human comfortable. Also, since it takes electricity in rather than heat, it has been waiting for green energy to become cheap enough that it could finally compete with fossil fuels. Great idea, all in all. Now let's see it transform these gas-burning industries like fertilizer and cement production.
Tetrad20: Except that using electricity to make heat is expensive, and we burn fossil fuels to create electricity. It is far more efficient to use that fossil fuel to make the heat required in these industrial processes.
Now with creating the electricity with greener methods, using it to create the heat desired makes more practical sense. Remember, heat is the 'product' we are after, in this case.
@@rondoenergy4228 Check my answer to Tetrad20, and let me know if I am understanding your goal and direction. I have no knowledge of your company or process, but from this video it made instant sense to me. That is if I am getting it correctly. - Cheers
I don’t understand. Where does the heat originate from? Is the heat produced by storing the energy?
The rondo unit uses electricity to power electric heaters like those found in a toaster or hairdryer. Those heaters heat up the bricks.
Am I the only one that when seeing these types of videos to get a smile on my face ? It later comes with thoughts a d doubts on how are they are going to achieve a much cheaper and efficient way to power something but also if they exist at all and they are not just a fake company trying to just milk money from investors and whatsoever. I hope they achieve their goal.
Thanks! Please follow along on our journey =]
Wow, awesome content!
Sensible thermal energy storage is nothing new. This concept is kinda cheap to make and easy to scale in means of pure heat storage. However there are some bottlenecks using an air as the heat transportation medium. 1) Air is very bad in conducting heat, so the heat exchanger between air /steam (or whatever medium) has high requirements for the heat trasfer area and this doesnt scale well, especially if you talk about heat power > 1 MW. 2) Hot air has very low density (>1 kg/m3) so it is no joke to make it move in some higher quantities. 3) using closed air loop meaning that the blower inlet has also higher temperature and there is same problem as in 2. point.
I think this concept has a good potential for just pure power to heat applications, but unfortunetally it is not so good for power to heat to power applications.
I'm a bit sceptical on the high efficiency and duration claimed.
Temperature is conducted in three ways: Direct conduction (on contact), convection, and radiation. Direct conduction can be avoided best by "air-gapping" the materials, or even better by "vacuum-gapping" like in Dewar vessels. Convection can be avoided by vacuum, too, or by materials that would significantly restrict the ability of the surrounding gas to move (like in styrofoam or glass wool).
However, at these temperatures, a major part of the heat is already transferred by radiation, i.e., infrared and visible light. And a good part of the emission is already in the red and yellow visible light. To accommodate for that, and for longevity, the inner walls of the insulator would have to be plated with gold, as other feasible metals (e.g. silver, as also used for Dewar vessels, or aluminium) would degrade too quickly under these harsh conditions. But the walls can't be made out of normal glass, because it would already get soft at temperatures > 1000°C. So a special glass, or even more expensive materials (like quartz or ceramics) would be needed. That significantly contributes to the cost, especially when considering the enormous areas that needed to be covered for a feasible storage of heat. And probably a single layer of insulation would not suffice.
Besides that, the material is under enormous mechanical stress. Microscopic cracks would be the consequence, and thus, either frequent maintenance or heat loss.
I don't say this can't work, I'm just a bit sceptical on the claimed numbers for efficiency and use cycles.
The heat that 'leaks' through the inner wall of the radiation chamber is surrounded by the air that will be blown back through the system and recycled, so there is very minimal heat loss.
@@rondoenergy4228 But that is only useful during the loading cycle of the storage. During storage time, it will lead to loss.
The Rondo unit discharges 24/7 so all of that heat is being used
@@concon424 ah, so it discharges while being charged? That's of course not a waste... 🤣
Btw. the patent only says "Heat from the solid medium is delivered continuously on demand.", not "while charging". And the so-called "dynamic insulation" is only a pre-heater for the gas to discharge the heat.
Good thing there are low temp boiling points.
Excellent work Rondo!
Thanks!
Rhondo, you may be to late... there is a system that DOES NOT require the Rankin Cycle. At what scale Mw/BTU have you generated at? I do like your concept, best of luck and Godspeed.
Just curious. Which system are you speaking of?
I would be extremely interested to see how well this scales down for the use of heat in smallscale industry. Ceramics and metalworking, the potential applications are significant.
It scales only for Home Use. This type of Heating was popular before the Oil Crisis of the 70s in Germany, and is Popular again today. It is not as efficient, as fossile fuels - but if you make use of cheaper nightly energy tariffs, you can basically charge these bois up "over night" ; and then let them dissipate their heat over the course of the day.
For large scale, this is , however, obviously idiotic.
Should be tested quickly in a small project to see real world benefit !
I agree! I am excited to see their continued progress, they said they have a prototype and I expect there will be reports on it soon!
True... instead of taking someone millions of dollar first...
So this is not a ‘battery’ in the conmon sense, but a Power-to-heat solution that can store heat for 1 day and delivers heat in form of steam, Super hot air etc to industries or other heat demanding users.
3:13 How it works.
Brilliant !
Great video!
Thanks 🙏 ❤
Cheers Pete! Hope to have you follow our decarbonization journey!
I can appreciate the benefits of storing energy cheaply as heat. However, I wonder if there is a trend that will limit the scope. I notice that the 'Off-Peak' electricity prices are going up faster than the 'Peak' prices.
Will the coming demand for power for EV recharging, cause an increase in this trend so there will be little difference between peak and off-peak prices?
The more renewables that are put on the grid the more peak generation there will be and lower costs. EVs will take advantage of that but the reality is a lot of people will be charging at night, along with using heat/AC/lights etc in their homes. So solar will always need to be sized up to account for storage needed to satisfying nighttime demand, and that power will always be more expensive. Peak solar generation today sometimes must be curtailed - a technology like this avoids curtailment while tackling the toughest emissions from industry.
@@concon424 "So solar will always need to be sized up to account for storage needed to satisfying nighttime demand," I'm not clear ... Are you meaning that "STORAGE must be increased to run 'heat/AC/lights'". If there was enough storage now there would be no need for curtailment now. I have a couple of DIY battery banks (30kWh) and I know the costs and savings. However, I suspect that industrial scale batteries may be much more expensive (I read it was ~900% more). Do you anticipate that EVs will mainly be charged around mid-day on sunny days?
@@SandyMcClintock if they are not charged at midday they do not accomplish the Mission to exist : Balance the Electric grid and give the possibility to install more PV vithout waste Energy in peak hours .
This should be the magic of EVs .
No. Greed will tho. Energy companies will maximize share holder profit by raising off peak energy prices up too.
What are the bricks made out of?
Interesting and great content keep it up
Thanks!
Well done. To bring attention to a little game....rondo is rondo
Ending battery storage means no batteries in phones, none in EVs... This stuff will replace some battery storage... It cannot fill all applications, not even all industrial heat applications and that is only a small part of all storage that is needed. A lot of electrical storage needs to be able to be used within milliseconds in order to balance the grid. If we need to spin up steam turbines the moment that balancing is needed, the electricity will flow too late for those applications...
It's possible to heat up it by solar concentrater pls confirm
Very awesome I would love to see you cover about the uses of Graphene that could be used in radiators for both on earth and space because of it being about 10 times more better than water cooling and 25 times less energy I believe tho I can't remember fullu but I do study a ton of science and stuff from new atlas, business insider, undecided with mat farewell, and more tho I would like you to cover from what I said of graphene that could be used for both on earth and space including maybe other small things and stuff like electronics and things. Thanks for the video, the quality is great, wish your channel was larger in terms of subscribers you deserve it!
Sigh... blatantly NO! Radiation goes by its black body radiation constant. Emmissivity constant. Graphene is not all that great at either absorbing or emitting. You are thinking about thermal conductivity, not radiation.
Just like the ancient pyramids were exactly like our old analogue systems where the Antarctica and the desert were used as two opposing fields of cold and heat connected to the centre of earth to send signals through the dimensions of space that’s exactly how this works
This still runs into the same issue as Polar Night. The amount of energy you would need to get it up to temp is massive. To heat a decent sized city of 100K, you'd need something like a megawatt nuclear reactor to provide all the electricity needed for heating the bricks... in which case, why not just use the electricity, which has very little transmission loss, to power electrical radiators?
I don't get it... we're trying anything and everything to produce and store power when we should be looking at nuclear which can power everything and doesn't need storage... Nuclear is green. Nuclear is clean. Nuclear lasts a helluva long time. Plus Fission can power Fusion, which will undoubtedly be the power supply of the future.
Well, the accidents made people very scared. The strategy, really, should be showing nuclear energy kills a lot less people per plant than any plants that burn stuff. As far as I'm aware it kills orders of magnitude less people than plants that burn stuff for energy.
That just the way to reframe. And, yes, the nuclear waste isn't really solved, but burning fuel also won't make a dent on global warming which is a bigger looming threat.
@@VeteranVandal There is somewhat a solve for the waste. There's actually two solutions. The first is thorium reactors. You can take the spent fuels from uranium reactors and burn them in thorium reactors which will reduce them more, which take the half-life from a few thousand years to a hundred years or so. After a few generations, the waste would no longer be a health risk. The second solution is diamond batteries. They'd encase the spent fuels within synthetic diamonds and use the beta decay to provide very low, but very long-term power. I'm going off of memory here, so the details may be off a smidge, but generally speaking, we do have solutions and they do work.
Edit: Diamond batteries are safe... thought I'd mention that.
Nuclear is clean and green?!?! Hanford in Washington State just started vitrification of untold barrels of decades-old liquid nuclear waste. Tell THEM how “clean and green” your beloved nuclear energy is! 😡
YEA this has been promised for 20 years. Still in the research phase at the university FOREVER
OR, we could use nuclear power and avoid ALL the issues that solar/wind & batteries cause…
Every option has many pros and cons! The issue is deciding which ones are most important for a given application
There's no energy free lunch with either 'green' wind/solar or nuclear ... just swapping one set of environmental issues for another. I'm reminded of the astronaut who said of the space shuttle 'you're sitting on a bomb with over ten thousand components ... all manufactured by the cheapest bidder'. 😉
Still no idea how you prevent heat just leaking away...
But this sounds like a great investment, just like Theranos.
sounds just like hot air
Hot air or steam at temperatures selected by our paying customers!
@@rondoenergy4228 generated with electricity instead of being created on demand by gas needing additional hardware. So this scheme is beneficial if you can score electricity cheaper than the cost for fuel correct? So this could be expressed in hours per year where this scenario takes place. Is it hundreds or thousands of hours? Turning electricity into heat is not a value prop by itself you got to also beat heatpumps that give at least tripple the heat for the same amount of energy but can't reach these Temps obviously
Can’t this method be used for sterling engines?
Sounds great. Seems well thought out, leveraging in every area.
"where heating is required"
Storing heat is not the same as storing electricity.
You cannot move heat instantly to point of use, turn a heat pump or charge an EV.
Moving heat at 1000-1500C for smelting, ciment is extremely hard, how do you pump heat, what are the pipes, most materials break down at these temperatures. etc.
Still a good way to use excess solar energy that is going to become more and more common. (unless EV batteries can use it)
Industrial plants already have heat networks they use to move heat around to multiple end uses at their facilities. The Rondo unit replaces gas fired boilers that are already being used on the facility’s heat network.
Lead would be a far better medium for storing heat, because of its relatively low melting temperature, high density, and the fact that a transition of phase is the best way to get a lot more crammed in, with solid-to-liquid being the best one.
I am a bit confused. Is this system storing electricity like a Lithium battery or heat? A Lithium battery stores electricity that can be used for any electrical application. This system seems to only store heat that can only be used as heat. I don't see how you can say it will "end battery storage". First, sufficient electrical power must be generated in a large enough volume to heat a large pile of bricks to 3,000 degrees. Well, what kind of power generator is this? When the heat is depleted what replaces it? We are talking about heat at kiln-like temperatures. What do you do with that kind of heat? Perhaps it would be useful in industry but this heat storage would have to be very close to the point of usage. Am I missing something?
Title should read "...will end up to one third of stationary battery storage"... Far from killing battery storage... I gotta downvote and select "do not recommend channel" for the sensationalistic title... The crazy title trend I have had enough of, and there is no end to the videos that have reasonable titles covering the same subjects so I do not miss out on anything as a result... Yes, I know this interaction still helps the popularity of this video... Just letting you know why the downvote since so many creators seem obsessed with every downvote and I am not trying to cause such distress...
Great video, waiting for more
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So does it transfer electricity or heating to other sectors??
We supply heat to heavy industry. There may be cases where electricity would be delivered too -- but heat is the primary form of energy our customers are seeking.
Vaaaporware
Steamware =]
Does the "dynamic insulation" only work while the battery is discharging ?
Nice to see this question. It's one of the many i had for this solution and seeing domeone else asking this, makes me happy. There is also a question about unstable temperature, regulation mechanisms, continuous heating up and cooling "bricks"? How many cycles can this material withstand? Can it be cooled completly or is there a special "usable" range? Just a few off the top of my head...
The dynamic insulation works 24/7 -- because the battery is discharging 24/7.
@@concon424 OK, nice. Discharging into what? If there is no need for the power at this moment, battery is getting charged, where does it discharge? Does that insulating air flow through the battery all of the time?
What are the bricks made of? I take it nothing specially rare as eluded to. But what makes bricks that different than sand? Is it just the increase in density?
@Thunderf00t seems like an issue when you need to heat things very hot. Only the top 50% can be used to heat to 1500C from a 3000C battery. Bye efficiency
Storing energy has always been the biggest problem.
The reason we drive gasoline powered cars is because gasoline has the best energy to wait ratio of the time.
The gas tank is the storage device.