I love projects like this. Nothing special, just a giant pile of engineered dirt in a metal can. That actually has a chance to get built. I look forward to living in a world assisted by these devices and never knowing they're there.
@@andrewkaiser7203 looks like the aluminum ion batteries will be used for a different task but are evolving in a similar way. Competing with lithium isn't necessarily about volume. It's about the discharge rate. If it can compete with the discharge rate I think the researchers may have something.
I think this is the way forward - minimal impact on existing technologies (district heating, industrial processes), minimal footprint, relatively low cost and rapid return of investment for installer. And no break-neck new technology/process/chemical involved. And they even managed to squeeze AI in, which increases the chance for investors to step in :) Congrats on the video - this time a bit more optimistic than usual :)
I'm not sure if you have any experience in this field but you're basically spot on. AI is the only real buzzword but ML is basically AI and definitely being used appropriately from what is described. Anyways, the powers that be will keep this under tight security due to high level IP but any rich ingenious person can replicate with amazing results.
@@ValidatingUsername The problem with ML is that you might need to train it again for new deployment - as the model created is calculated on the inputs you get and those will be different. The other option is to set your model once and then just use the resulting pattern in the device ;) But that's then just scalar model, not ML :) While I find the idea of using constant learning and adjusting in these devices interesting, I don't think it's that usable or makes such a difference - the hysteresis of the system will prevent you to make some fast changes and prediction model for surrounding environment/target will have too many parameters. So yeah, I believe this is another case where the "AI" is used only as a buzz-word.
@@rklauco I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s just a good old fuzzy logic optimisation system tbh. Calling it AI is kind of a flashback if that’s true! (And any neural network training may end up defacto reimplementing fuzzy logic for the reasons you mention!)
The amusing thought that crossed my mind was: I hope this Rondo Energy's news hit the fossil fuel industries like a ton of bricks (and hopefully a hell of a lot more.)
The city of Halle, also Germany, has been operating their 50 million liter thermos bottle since 2018. It seems to be doing well and is an unbeatably cheap way to store energy. I imagine replacing the old power plant with a heat pump would be a fantastic way to decarbonize and increase flexibility on the demand side of the electricity grid.
Yeah, I'm stuck with the question what heat pump is envisioned for this kind of use? Because let's be honest, the water battery is by far the best heat battery because you get so much energy content per kelvin added and under the philosophy of efficient heat pumping you preferably don't want to climb that kelvin ladder too high anyway ... but one is tempted to use the water battery at least all the way to 100 °C because otherwise the energy density turns out to be meagre after all... but then, what heat pump to use? Typical consumer heat pumps are designed to pump to 50 or 60 °C...
@@5th_decile Industrial heat pumps typically work at 80°, but designs with higher temperatures are in development according to various projects that can be found online. Even water itself is considered as a working fluid. Thinking about it, looking into the new developments of high temperature heat pumps could be an interesting topic for this channel. Without a doubt, a lot will happen in this field with increasing electrification.
I guess temperature vs pressure is a limiting factor in using water as the storage medium, if you want to go beyond the boiling point you have to contain the pressure, with all the associated costs and dangers (giant pressure bomb in the centre of a city) whereas the brick medium can take a much higher temperature without any of these issues. Of course, the actual energy stored per kg of medium will depend on the specific heat capacity for each but not having to consider pressure build up suggests a win for brick in my mind. Of course also have to consider the energy conversion at either end (in and out). Probably simpler for water compared to brick. Would be an interesting cost/benefit analysis.
The Saale river could supply heat that is then condensed with a large heat pump - like it's done in Esbjerg. As cities in Germany must make plans for heat networks until 2028 they may pretty well be considering this already.
It's not about the design but about refrigerant. If liquid turns to gas at 60deg c then you can't heat water up to more than 60 deg c. Moreover the hotter the water is the less efficient whole system is. If you want to heat up water to 55 deg c, cop drops from 3.5 to 2.5 or less depending on external temperature. Also refrigerants are potent ghg gases. We basically should stop using heat pumps as soon as possible, but there is no good alternative at the moment. We have to little energy to have brick batteries in homes and industry.
Pedantic point The original Thermos®️ flask was not made of stainless steel, instead the drink was contained in a double thin walled glass flask, with the glass silvered on the vacuum facing interior walls. The drink didn't taste metallic any more than it would out of a glass teapot. Thermos®️ is a brand name, but the inventor of those flasks was called Dewar, who invented them to keep things cold, not hot. Did like Liquid Oxygen. In cryo lands three are still called "Dewar flasks" and the physics labs at Manchester have some in all sizes from a fraction of a litre to ones on wheels about 1.6m tall. The problem with a Dewar flash for outdoor activities is that they are fragile: drop them from less than a meter into rock and the glass shatters. That's why Thermos® went over to stainless steel for their top of the range flasks, and nowadays most hour drink flasks are stainless steel.
@nopenope1 I have dropped my current phone over a dozen times in the last 2 years and it's fine. I don't even have a screen protector on it. When I was a child, I had thermos and dropping them from any height broke the contents. I think a gorilla glass thermos would not break because the outer plastic shell would protect it from direct impact buy a rock or pebble and the gorilla glass is more than strong enough to survive the g-forces. And my phone is not a particularly expensive phone.
yup. and the fact that we will keep innovating, refining and making other storage options cheaper and more efficient means that eventually (who knows how soon, but hopefully within a decade or so) we can store all excess energy generated by solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal for use during the off-peak generation times. Combine this with more efficient usage from appliances, and smarter usage behaviors, and we can FINALLY be rid of fossil fuels for energy generation AND transportation. Sure, we will never be fully divested of petroleum products as they are just too damned versatile for many of the things we depend on, but we can finally stop BURNING them. of course this will make the petrosexuals extremely angry.
Reminds me of the refractory brick 'storage heaters' my parents had installed in the 1960's. They took advantage of cheap overnight 'off peak' electricity to heat up, and slowly release the heat throughout the day. They were the best heating system, better than radiators-worth of central heating on the walls, and they looked pretty stylish for the time. Even for these times I suspect.
They were hot all day when you were out, and had cooled down by evening when you were in. We need domestic storage heaters which are bigger and better insulated than the old ones.
We think we look pretty stylish too =] But yes this is principally the same exact thing -- but we charge and discharge simultaneously so we deliver heat 24/7.
I currently use one. It's a dump load for my off grid PV system. Heats during the day when it's sunny and releases the heat in the evening. Works a treat.
Lets not forget that energy conversion is needed (from heat to electricity) for use for stuff other than a specific powerplant that needs heat. This can drop the efficiency.
Your point is more widely valid than just electricity Conversion of heart into mechanical energy is the inefficient thing: so this is a useful way to store heat where heat is needed later, but not so good when wanting mechanical energy. That includes turning a generator to make electricity.
Our combined heat and power (CHP) efficiency is around 95%. Most of our early customers, however, are simply looking for steam to replace their existing gas-fired boilers.
That's a hot topic (pun intended 🙂) indeed. Nice to see that the industry is scaling fast. This kind of technology can't come soon enough. As a matter of fact it should have been there some time ago but better late than never.
Re: "10% of the hot water requirements of the entire city of Berlin" This! It is utterly insane that things like district heating working off of renewable resources or (at the bare minimum) taking advantage of waste heat from industrial/electrical production processes. You deserve this. I deserve this. *We* deserve this! This HAS to happen on the municipal level. That's the scale where you can make a difference. So do it! Call your local representatives and make a fuss about this. Start with convincing your neighbours that this is doable. It's expensive up front because it's infrastructure but that's not the point. The point is that we can pay for this now and have the infrastructure in place to minimize the constantly creepy costs associated with climate change as well as have a measurable reduction in greenhouse gas emissions locally. Do it. You. Yourself. Make a fuss! Be loud! Demand answers and solutions! Your siblings deserve it, your kids deserve it. Do it for yourself and ourselves. We need you. Let's GO! WOO!
Also worth checking out the startup Antora which does a similar thing but with carbon blocks, which actually glow very brightly when heated, so they also have PV integrated into the system to generate electricity, when/if that's needed more than or in addition to industrial heat.
We love what Antora is doing and wish them the best, there's a lot of market to cover! Ultimately, we think our materials are the safest to use for heat storage, and have been proven to work in the steel industry for hundreds of years already.
If I’m not mistaken, the air and temperature control system would be totally doable by a fuzzy logic system. (Such as you’d find in a sensor drier, or some dishwashers.) Which was hyped as AI in the 90s but quickly became just another mundane thing instead of “AI”, which is a moving target. Unless Rondo are really using neural networks for some reason, and even if they are they could well be reimplementing fuzzy logic if the network is analysed, it’s kind of funny to see it getting called AI again! I guess it’s somewhat appropriate, the 90s are in fashion again in some other ways 😉
Thanks Dave. Another positive solution that underlines the scale of effort underway to solve our energy transition. Reasons to be cheerful as Mr Dury used to say.
Three questions that I think should be evalueted. 1. Power loss in distribution/maximum distance covered. 2. Power loss for transforming this into electricity. 3. Energy wasted and enviornmental impact during the fabrication and implamentation of this.
1. Would be a local consideration and very geographically dependant - so I can't really speak to this. 2. You're probably looking at 100% efficiency or near it for converting electricity to heat, but 30-40% for converting heat back to electricity; however most thermal energy storage companies argue that round-trip efficiency can be a misleading metric when considering storage solutions; citing that while a grid may only be able to recover 30-40% of stored energy, the cost of storage and recovery will cost around 10% of what it costs to store the same amount of energy in a lithium-ion battery. Thus, even though the round-trip efficiency is much lower, the cost per joule of reclaimed energy is still better value due to the low capital cost of thermal storage. Whether this is viable will depend on the cost and availability of off-peak electricity. 3. Most thermal storage companies are looking to use materials that are either readily available, abundant and recyclable - because there are no emissions in the use-cycle of the bricks they can be reclaimed after the 30-40 year lifespan and recycled into new bricks at a rate of almost 100%.
My fave part about the heat storage battery is it’s literally just a kiln, and the input/output system uses known and mature industrial principles, math and technology. The innovation is the brick design, but 70s hot air passive solar house builds used beds of 3” cobbles in the crawlspace for the same reason - predictable heat release and turbulent airflow with minimal stagnation. These need to be slapped onto every single steam generator power plant on earth already in service, and two on every solar and wind installation.
@@mihir2781 The efficiency of resistance heaters is pretty darn close to 100%, mostly switching and line loss, but heat capacity of the materials drives input/output efficiency. Water can hold the most BTU per pound (other than obscure chemistry or phase change answers) of any storage medium, but only to the PV=NRT limits of water and container. Once you get up to a thousand degrees, efficiency is less important than stability, safety and ease of use. Dumping excess wind, sun heat or PV wattage overboard is zero efficiency, so any amount of storage between demand cycles to level the grid is an improvement that makes wind and solar a viable solution and not a joke for trump rallies.
Very encouraging. As a ceramicist, I felt it necessary to say that the Rondo system is far from CO2 free in production unless the manufacture of the "Bricks" is conducted with renewable energy. I'm sure they've done their calculations correctly but the manufacture of large ceramic objects that can withstand 1500 degrees is usually very heavy on energy input. I don't know of a concrete product that could withstand repeated exposure to such high temperatures. As regards the degradation of the units, I can see that the ceramics (if that's what they call it) would not degrade through the expansion and contraction as long as the temperature is carefully manage to avoid the major physical change in silica (quartz inversion) at 573°C, notorious for destroying ceramic objects, particularly bulky objects like these. The electric elements will suffer degradation far sooner than the brick. I still think it's a serious move in the right direction and the promis of large scale production is really positive.
One of the nice things about this system is that it would have a lot of use in de-carbonization of concrete and refractory brick manufacture. If you put the plants in places like CA where there's a huge renewable energy surplus during the day, you can charge up the bricks. Even if the cement plant is using fossil fuels for its primary heating, they could swap over to the high temp air to reduce or eliminate emissions during the middle of the day. If they were using electrical heating for the thermal input, they could get even greater savings, as the plant could run off the grid during cheap renewable power periods and off the bricks during the night. Steel and other metal refining could see large carbon/cost savings with this tech with fairly modest changes to their infrastructure. As for the electrical elements breaking down, I wonder if these bricks are microwave absorbers. If so, it might be possible to simply use magnetrons to heat them up through microwave transparent windows and keep all of the electronic components at more modest temperatures.
Solar thermal is the answer. I've been saying it for years. I'm prototyping a solar thermal platform right now. I will continue this relentless pursuit until I have a viable product for the market. It is proving the most challenging project I have ever endeavored to complete. I hope others will realize the potential along the way.
The falling cost of wind and solar PV has made it very challenging for solar thermal to compete. Also, in our market, we're targeting facilities where energy density is critical because they don't have excess land, so a large solar thermal plant would not be viable onsite. Also, when you transport heat over distances, you lose a lot of it, so it's important your heat generation is located close to where it's being consumed, which is why our energy dense batteries fit right onsite much like a gas-boiler does.
Brexit? Creativity flounders in rightwing environments. The left charges into the future, the right retreats into the past. Tell me if this isn't true.
Yes, old, time tested ideas that use simple ingredients are the solution. The thermos is such a brilliant container, I am so glad to see that there is lots of effort going into making better use of thermoses for energy storage
I didn't realise this until I started to look at who was producing thermal storage systems in the UK; these is a company called Caldera in the UK that is using vacuum as the insulation!
It's good. In spite of all the bad stuff happening we have to keep pushing on with these positive measures and you never know we might just climb out of this hole we've got ourselves in.
Dave, this is super encouraging and needs to be massively scaled!! I live in Canada where we need to massively scale up the geo-thermal via closed loop use of old drilled gas and oil holes where pressurized water can be pumped into these shafts to be super-heated and returned to the surface to turn turbines for power generation. Would love to see an update for this and how it can be integrated into heat storage as well.
More people should know about the Drake Landing Solar Community in Okotoks, Alberta Canada. Solar energy captured in the summer to heat homes in the winter.
Looks useful for very high temperature air. The specs for the RBH100 reveal an energy density similar to water. 13m x 10m x 10m for 100MWh is (I think) 280J/cm^3, the same as heating water by just under 70 degrees. For something like district heating the water tank approach will be simpler and probably cheaper. Danish seasonal pit storage costs are available online (perhaps 35 EUR/m^3), and as the pit scales the losses are reduced (energy stored goes with the cube but the area of the tank is the square). In that case charging with solar thermal collectors or heat pumps will make more sense than burning the electricity.
The best is not to transform the energy, i.e. heat to movement. The problem is that storing heat for winter needs a lot of time, half a year. The lava from volcanos keeps hot during even years, only with the insulation of the same lava crust and because of the big size of the deposit. What about huge underground deposits of molten salts in order to take advantage or latent heat too? Or perhaps that is very expensive for large masses and then it is better to keep it in bricks, rocks, etc.?
Essentially we are manually creating geothermal energy for a storage. Seems like we could combine it with direct geothermal energy and storage pretty easily and then you have both storage and production combined with easy swapping.
Early Geothermal energy plants suffered a slow but persistent loss of capacity over time (IIRC as the rock cooled), eventually resulting in either having to move the extraction point or close the plant. Has that issue been understood well enough now that we can use it long term?
Wow. Hot stuff indeed. One I learned about in my secondary school, some... lemme see... yeah, over forty years ago. Regenerators and recuperators, they are called in the trade. Also, accumulative electric heaters, using special ceramic "bricks" heated by cheaper electricity during off-peak hours (aka "lower tariff" hours) have been around for even longer than that, so yeah, hot stuff. Like, really hot. Beam me up, Scotty... ;-)
Everything manufactured has a cost, even handmade items, like my house. It's the depreciation rate and total life that is the measure of its final worthwhileness.
Loving that so many different people are coming up with different ways of storing energy. No one storage type will be the holy grail as each has its best use applications. Therefore the more types of storage come on line the better we will be.
I am honored to be the same species as you sir, thank you for all you efforts to bring us good and bad news related to this global challenge we're facing. If you by chance find projects that explicitly require money for us to invest/donate, I'd personally be extremely thrilled! Thank you very much!
It's always great to hear that despite the unhelpful actions of our idiot politicians, innovative businesses are just getting on with the energy transition via simple but hugely effective ideas like this.
It's great, yes. But it still needs political guidance, and unfortunately it's other businesses, like the dinosaur fossil fuel ⛽ companies that have the resources to -bribe- lobby politicians
I'm not denying that idiot politicians exist but I'm seeing plenty of US Democratic politicians paving the way for renewable energy solutions both at the state and Federal level. Incentive structures and political and regulatory support are key for entrepreneurial success and for getting to scale.
There is also cold storage. I went to an university where the air condionning system was using fresh air at night and off peak electricity to make ice, and using the ice to make cold air during the day. The heat pump was more efficient because the air was colder during the night. And electricity was cheaper at night. Ice storage is not expensive.
My father was part of the design team at Bethlehem Steel for (what was then in 1962) the largest integrated steel making facility in the U.S. called Burns Harbor located in Michigan City, IN. They developed and implemented many innovations in the capture and re-use of waste heat in various parts of the operation. We visited that facility in 2019 for what was the 55th anniversary of rolling the first piece of plate steel off of the mill in 1964. The plant is still in operation today as part of the Cleveland-Cliffs company (stock ticker CLF). For anyone who has never seen the process of making iron in a blast furnace and then converting it to steel in a basic oxygen furnace, and then turning it into basic steel products such as steel plate, hot rolled coil, nickel plated products, etc., it is truly awe-inspiring in scale. Unfortunately, it is also a major carbon generator, something the industry has been working to improve for decades.
blast furnaces for steelmaking have used the stacked brick method of heat exchange since forever. they have 3 separate blockhouses . the superhot gasses coming from the furnace go through 2 of the brickhouses while incoming air is heated by one. they alternate like every 20 minutes or so
I have been running propolene glycol, that is fermented fruit juice antifreeze through 100 sq.ft. liquid solar panels then through radiant tubing in floor for 25 years here in New Mexico. Works great. I use collectors from 1970s. Nobody makes a cheap steel version now.
The literal building block of their system is also one of the most energy intensive manufacturering processes. I wonder where their energy comes from to produce these bricks?
Hi there, we recover the lifecycle emissions of our systems in only a few hours of operating! Bricks are actually not too energy intensive to create, especially when they're created using our own heat batteries instead of gas kilns!
@@rondoenergy4228 Glad to hear it will be possible to use heat from your storage system to create the bricks. I'd love to see if your thermal batteries could be usefully combined with absorption cooling.
Back in the fortys mum used to put house bricks in the oven heated by the fire in the front room and wrapped in newspaper for hot water bottles,how forward thinking was that.
When musk renamed twitter to X , I began promoting the idea that "tweets" need to be renamed "Xcretions". Now ,my next task in the global ridiculing of musk is to suggest that anything with the prefix "giga" that isn't actually 1,000,000,000 times something , should be renamed "wanker" - as in wankerfactory or wankerpress.
This is same as Electrical storage heaters of 70's but on industry scale. This tech was discontinued since as better cheaper to maintain systems came about. If a brick or bricks brakeup in 5 -10 years airflow and efficiency will drop and become very expensive to replace faulty bricks.
I also wonder how can this survive 40 years with all these tiny fins in the bricks, when you heat it up from like 80C to 1500C there has to be a lot of thermal expansion and shrinking going on, so it will likely crack....
You'll still have to produce the energy to heat these bricks. It's not decarbonization per say but optimization of renewable capacity. Still super useful though 😊
What a clever idea. A "simple, drop-in, zero emission replacement for industrial boilers, powered by fossil fuels." So instead of needing to rebuild an entire facility you could just take out the boilers and retrofit with this system. It seems like the only limiting factor is the availability of renewable energy, but you can still reduce emissions just by installing one of these units. And they say it lasts for 40 years, but you could probably get even more performance out of one by replacing the air circulation system and anything else that wears out but keeping the bricks. I like it.
I want a few kilos of molten salt in my cellar in an insulated tank and a stirling cycle powered generator Someone need to mass produce this. Great channel. Never miss it.
That's very exciting. I wonder what the maximum charging power in these systems is, because taking advantage of high supply hours requires being able to charge fast
Seeing the Berlin Kettle, I immediately thought of all those old storage tanks for coal gas which litter our cities (Australia), and which have been sitting at ground level for years. I'm not suggesting that these could be used directly, just that maybe the sites could be readily converted. They may not be convenient to large scale wind or solar farms, but boy we sure have a lot of rooftop units, much of the output of which is probably currently dumped. Given the number of EV's going up in flames, I think that I'd rather sell my excess to such a scheme than to put a big Lithium battery anywhere near my house. As it stands, the rebate for solar is on a steady downward course here as daytime supply greatly exceeds demand.
I wondered about how they make the cement bricks as making cement produces 1/3 of global emissions. one of the articles on the companies website says they will use Rondo's energy system to make the bricks using green energy without most emission as well as partner to sell it to their own customers. This is really a great tech. How’s the ROI on a modular brick unit? In Canada it would be useful to make a system that uses wind and solar and geo combined with this brick generator to be used in new subdivisions. We now use heat pumps which are good but we can foresee electricity prices will go up and since in Canada BC area our wonderful hydro power stations will start being affected by drought and global electricity costs and a great increase in EV so we need to make some wise decisions in BC. They should partner with a big Canadian energy player like Suncor and the Federal government as we have lots of wind and sun for energy sources and government support. Why not license the technology and get it out faster globally? License it before some countries copy the technology as it doesn't look too complicated.
Just to be clear: these are not made of ordinary cement. They are "refractory bricks" according to Dave. These are far from a new thing (used in iron making for about a century, and you may remember storage heaters?) The only thing new in the Rondo process is the funky shape of the bricks to maximise heat exchange with the gases that heat them up, and later with the gases used to take away the stored heat. A Google search could me this info: Refractory materials are those that can withstand high temperatures without the heat damaging their structure, resistance, or thermal conductivity. In the case of bricks, the chemical composition of refractories is different from that of regular bricks, which also influences their color and thermal conductivity.
Ain't human ingenuity great! So many great ideas that should have been funded, tested and rolled out years ago when we had the faintest chance of avoiding the Great Simplification. As things stand, I listen to these ideas, shrug and sigh. For most, it's 10 years of development before the technology would be ready to roll out, 15 before the infrastructure is in place to scale up production, and 20 before we start to see impacts. Time that we ain't got. Still, it's always interesting to know about this stuff and contemplate what could have been. Thanks again, Dave!
In the battle of ideas between Malthusians and Cornucopians, maybe it’s important to consider that there is some truth in both philosophies. On the one hand, we can’t over a couple of hundred years squander hundreds of millions of years worth of fossil fuels production by our planet, without any negative consequences. But on the other hand, to those who say it’s impossible to wean ourselves into a much, much lower fossil fuels diet, we can point to the ingenuity of humanity, and this very interesting example. Thanks, Dave, for making us aware of these technologies. It’s good to have some optimism in an otherwise doom and gloom TH-cam environment, with the skeptics making ridiculous claims about how higher levels of CO2 are great, because “plant food”, while on the their hand real scientists explain about potential upcoming tipping points.
High input costs are probably the reason why low-energy heat is not used more. Unfortunately, even waste heat from nuclear power plants is not used today. Only about 30% of nuclear fission energy is converted into electricity. About 60% of this huge energy escapes as waste heat. There are only a minimum of projects where waste heat is used to heat cities. This is where it should start. One such new project was completed this year at the Temelin nuclear power plant in the Czech Republic after years of planning. Thanks for nice videos!
There are other benefits. A lot of commercial processes need to run 24/7. Rondo reckon 5 hours of solar power is enough to run the plant 24 hours. In situations where there is a queue to be connected to the grid, this can be bypassed by colocating solar panels. If they have surplus, the heat can be used to generate electricity allowing them to arbitrage price differences. A good way to kill the dünkelflaute. (Windless nights)
With this and other heat transfer technologies I always wonder why it hasn't been done already. if this can be done surely all the excess heat produce in foundries and other metal work facilities could be used in a similar way on traditional industries without the need of a battery that is heated just for that purpose
Basically it comes down to a need - heat storage has been used for a long time to capture excess heat in foundries (glassworks comes to mind) but mostly just for heat-to-heat (heat input and heat output) - or more recently for CSP (Solar) heat-to-electricity. In both cases you have limited temperature for input so it doesn't get quite hot enough for purpose. Using electricity-to-electricity for thermal storage is incredibly wasteful (compared to lithium-ion batteries or pumped hydro etc) and prior to now just wasn't economically viable given that you're only recovering around 30-40% of the electricity (aka round-trip efficiency). Why it's so viable now is because electricity has become so cheap on renewable dense grids - there's places in the US midwest where the price of electricity is negative 30% of the time. So now, even if you're only recovering 30-40% of that power it's still hugely profitable if your capital expenditure to store it is low enough. These batteries cost roughly a tenth to build and maintain than a lithium battery of similar capacity, and so you're CapEx is so low that you don't really care about round-trip efficiency.
How do they produce the cement for the bricks? Isn’t that a very heat intensive process that, at this time, is still very much relying on fossil fuels?
Portland Cement production requires heating limestone to 1400 degrees Celsius. This sounds like a good fit. I wonder if you could replace these bricks with limestone instead.
I love projects like this. Nothing special, just a giant pile of engineered dirt in a metal can. That actually has a chance to get built. I look forward to living in a world assisted by these devices and never knowing they're there.
But also simple enough to be built under license allowing rapid expansion and stable income/profits for Rondo.
Take a look at the Aluminum-Graphene battery. If you could choose one or the other, which one would you pick?
💯 agree with you. Also, I'm sorry to be that guy, but it's, "they're there".
@@jameskent9759 fixed it
@@andrewkaiser7203 looks like the aluminum ion batteries will be used for a different task but are evolving in a similar way. Competing with lithium isn't necessarily about volume. It's about the discharge rate. If it can compete with the discharge rate I think the researchers may have something.
I think this is the way forward - minimal impact on existing technologies (district heating, industrial processes), minimal footprint, relatively low cost and rapid return of investment for installer.
And no break-neck new technology/process/chemical involved.
And they even managed to squeeze AI in, which increases the chance for investors to step in :)
Congrats on the video - this time a bit more optimistic than usual :)
ai, the investor buzzword of the year eh?
@@___.51 Whatever it takes to pry the checkbooks open.
I'm not sure if you have any experience in this field but you're basically spot on.
AI is the only real buzzword but ML is basically AI and definitely being used appropriately from what is described.
Anyways, the powers that be will keep this under tight security due to high level IP but any rich ingenious person can replicate with amazing results.
@@ValidatingUsername The problem with ML is that you might need to train it again for new deployment - as the model created is calculated on the inputs you get and those will be different.
The other option is to set your model once and then just use the resulting pattern in the device ;) But that's then just scalar model, not ML :)
While I find the idea of using constant learning and adjusting in these devices interesting, I don't think it's that usable or makes such a difference - the hysteresis of the system will prevent you to make some fast changes and prediction model for surrounding environment/target will have too many parameters.
So yeah, I believe this is another case where the "AI" is used only as a buzz-word.
@@rklauco I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s just a good old fuzzy logic optimisation system tbh. Calling it AI is kind of a flashback if that’s true! (And any neural network training may end up defacto reimplementing fuzzy logic for the reasons you mention!)
The amusing thought that crossed my mind was: I hope this Rondo Energy's news hit the fossil fuel industries like a ton of bricks (and hopefully a hell of a lot more.)
No, they will just them out and then scrap the plants.
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The city of Halle, also Germany, has been operating their 50 million liter thermos bottle since 2018. It seems to be doing well and is an unbeatably cheap way to store energy. I imagine replacing the old power plant with a heat pump would be a fantastic way to decarbonize and increase flexibility on the demand side of the electricity grid.
Yeah, I'm stuck with the question what heat pump is envisioned for this kind of use? Because let's be honest, the water battery is by far the best heat battery because you get so much energy content per kelvin added and under the philosophy of efficient heat pumping you preferably don't want to climb that kelvin ladder too high anyway ... but one is tempted to use the water battery at least all the way to 100 °C because otherwise the energy density turns out to be meagre after all... but then, what heat pump to use? Typical consumer heat pumps are designed to pump to 50 or 60 °C...
@@5th_decile Industrial heat pumps typically work at 80°, but designs with higher temperatures are in development according to various projects that can be found online. Even water itself is considered as a working fluid. Thinking about it, looking into the new developments of high temperature heat pumps could be an interesting topic for this channel. Without a doubt, a lot will happen in this field with increasing electrification.
I guess temperature vs pressure is a limiting factor in using water as the storage medium, if you want to go beyond the boiling point you have to contain the pressure, with all the associated costs and dangers (giant pressure bomb in the centre of a city) whereas the brick medium can take a much higher temperature without any of these issues. Of course, the actual energy stored per kg of medium will depend on the specific heat capacity for each but not having to consider pressure build up suggests a win for brick in my mind. Of course also have to consider the energy conversion at either end (in and out). Probably simpler for water compared to brick. Would be an interesting cost/benefit analysis.
The Saale river could supply heat that is then condensed with a large heat pump - like it's done in Esbjerg. As cities in Germany must make plans for heat networks until 2028 they may pretty well be considering this already.
It's not about the design but about refrigerant. If liquid turns to gas at 60deg c then you can't heat water up to more than 60 deg c. Moreover the hotter the water is the less efficient whole system is. If you want to heat up water to 55 deg c, cop drops from 3.5 to 2.5 or less depending on external temperature. Also refrigerants are potent ghg gases. We basically should stop using heat pumps as soon as possible, but there is no good alternative at the moment. We have to little energy to have brick batteries in homes and industry.
Pedantic point
The original Thermos®️ flask was not made of stainless steel, instead the drink was contained in a double thin walled glass flask, with the glass silvered on the vacuum facing interior walls. The drink didn't taste metallic any more than it would out of a glass teapot.
Thermos®️ is a brand name, but the inventor of those flasks was called Dewar, who invented them to keep things cold, not hot. Did like Liquid Oxygen. In cryo lands three are still called "Dewar flasks" and the physics labs at Manchester have some in all sizes from a fraction of a litre to ones on wheels about 1.6m tall.
The problem with a Dewar flash for outdoor activities is that they are fragile: drop them from less than a meter into rock and the glass shatters.
That's why Thermos® went over to stainless steel for their top of the range flasks, and nowadays most hour drink flasks are stainless steel.
You know with modern gorilla glass, I bet they could make thermos bottles that were durable.
@@macmcleod1188 only that it still breaks ;)
@nopenope1 I have dropped my current phone over a dozen times in the last 2 years and it's fine. I don't even have a screen protector on it.
When I was a child, I had thermos and dropping them from any height broke the contents. I think a gorilla glass thermos would not break because the outer plastic shell would protect it from direct impact buy a rock or pebble and the gorilla glass is more than strong enough to survive the g-forces.
And my phone is not a particularly expensive phone.
stainless steel vacuum one work just as good
@@GroovyVideo2 I never thought so because the steel was a better conductor of heat or cold.
Plus, mine had a taste that I didn't like.
Thanks for featuring us Dave, and for putting a spotlight on this very important topic -- decarbonizing industrial heat would cut global CO2 by ~22%!
Excellent as always Dave. These simple low maintenance energy storage options are game changing.
yup. and the fact that we will keep innovating, refining and making other storage options cheaper and more efficient means that eventually (who knows how soon, but hopefully within a decade or so) we can store all excess energy generated by solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal for use during the off-peak generation times. Combine this with more efficient usage from appliances, and smarter usage behaviors, and we can FINALLY be rid of fossil fuels for energy generation AND transportation. Sure, we will never be fully divested of petroleum products as they are just too damned versatile for many of the things we depend on, but we can finally stop BURNING them.
of course this will make the petrosexuals extremely angry.
@@ThatOpalGuy No such thing as petrosexuals.
They all just do it for the money.
@@ThatOpalGuypetrosexuals, Nice new word in the vocabulary😂
@paulbrouyere1735 I wish I'd made it up
Simple is boring, boring is good!
Reminds me of the refractory brick 'storage heaters' my parents had installed in the 1960's. They took advantage of cheap overnight 'off peak' electricity to heat up, and slowly release the heat throughout the day. They were the best heating system, better than radiators-worth of central heating on the walls, and they looked pretty stylish for the time. Even for these times I suspect.
They were hot all day when you were out, and had cooled down by evening when you were in. We need domestic storage heaters which are bigger and better insulated than the old ones.
We got rid of ours as they didn't really allow heating on demand. (Yes, I really am that old.)
We think we look pretty stylish too =] But yes this is principally the same exact thing -- but we charge and discharge simultaneously so we deliver heat 24/7.
I currently use one. It's a dump load for my off grid PV system. Heats during the day when it's sunny and releases the heat in the evening. Works a treat.
@@clivebashford2056They probably just needed better insulation and controls.
Lets not forget that energy conversion is needed (from heat to electricity) for use for stuff other than a specific powerplant that needs heat. This can drop the efficiency.
Your point is more widely valid than just electricity
Conversion of heart into mechanical energy is the inefficient thing: so this is a useful way to store heat where heat is needed later, but not so good when wanting mechanical energy. That includes turning a generator to make electricity.
This would be great for capturing low energy excess heat from manufacturing process if your city had a public hot water supply. Oh communism
Our combined heat and power (CHP) efficiency is around 95%. Most of our early customers, however, are simply looking for steam to replace their existing gas-fired boilers.
That's a hot topic (pun intended 🙂) indeed. Nice to see that the industry is scaling fast. This kind of technology can't come soon enough. As a matter of fact it should have been there some time ago but better late than never.
Full steam ahead! 😉
Re: "10% of the hot water requirements of the entire city of Berlin"
This! It is utterly insane that things like district heating working off of renewable resources or (at the bare minimum) taking advantage of waste heat from industrial/electrical production processes.
You deserve this. I deserve this. *We* deserve this!
This HAS to happen on the municipal level. That's the scale where you can make a difference. So do it! Call your local representatives and make a fuss about this. Start with convincing your neighbours that this is doable.
It's expensive up front because it's infrastructure but that's not the point. The point is that we can pay for this now and have the infrastructure in place to minimize the constantly creepy costs associated with climate change as well as have a measurable reduction in greenhouse gas emissions locally.
Do it. You. Yourself. Make a fuss! Be loud! Demand answers and solutions! Your siblings deserve it, your kids deserve it. Do it for yourself and ourselves. We need you. Let's GO! WOO!
You are absolutely right and that is the technology that should be used here in Australia. Thank you.
I agree. But the politicians would say that putting hot bricks in your car would ruin your weekend!
Ahoy! We agree mate!
Also worth checking out the startup Antora which does a similar thing but with carbon blocks, which actually glow very brightly when heated, so they also have PV integrated into the system to generate electricity, when/if that's needed more than or in addition to industrial heat.
We love what Antora is doing and wish them the best, there's a lot of market to cover! Ultimately, we think our materials are the safest to use for heat storage, and have been proven to work in the steel industry for hundreds of years already.
Thanks!
Thanks for your support. Much appreciated!
Thanks
Thanks for your support. Much appreciated!
If I’m not mistaken, the air and temperature control system would be totally doable by a fuzzy logic system. (Such as you’d find in a sensor drier, or some dishwashers.)
Which was hyped as AI in the 90s but quickly became just another mundane thing instead of “AI”, which is a moving target.
Unless Rondo are really using neural networks for some reason, and even if they are they could well be reimplementing fuzzy logic if the network is analysed, it’s kind of funny to see it getting called AI again! I guess it’s somewhat appropriate, the 90s are in fashion again in some other ways 😉
There's no way it's more than an algorithm. AI is just a squishy enough term to use and gets investors going because they know nothing.
Actually a simple PID controller would be more than sufficient
@@michaelharrison1093 great, so even simpler haha
It sounds to me like they are trying desperately to protect some IP and make it sound sexy for investors.
Thanks Dave. Another positive solution that underlines the scale of effort underway to solve our energy transition. Reasons to be cheerful as Mr Dury used to say.
Three questions that I think should be evalueted.
1. Power loss in distribution/maximum distance covered.
2. Power loss for transforming this into electricity.
3. Energy wasted and enviornmental impact during the fabrication and implamentation of this.
1. Would be a local consideration and very geographically dependant - so I can't really speak to this.
2. You're probably looking at 100% efficiency or near it for converting electricity to heat, but 30-40% for converting heat back to electricity; however most thermal energy storage companies argue that round-trip efficiency can be a misleading metric when considering storage solutions; citing that while a grid may only be able to recover 30-40% of stored energy, the cost of storage and recovery will cost around 10% of what it costs to store the same amount of energy in a lithium-ion battery. Thus, even though the round-trip efficiency is much lower, the cost per joule of reclaimed energy is still better value due to the low capital cost of thermal storage. Whether this is viable will depend on the cost and availability of off-peak electricity.
3. Most thermal storage companies are looking to use materials that are either readily available, abundant and recyclable - because there are no emissions in the use-cycle of the bricks they can be reclaimed after the 30-40 year lifespan and recycled into new bricks at a rate of almost 100%.
My fave part about the heat storage battery is it’s literally just a kiln, and the input/output system uses known and mature industrial principles, math and technology.
The innovation is the brick design, but 70s hot air passive solar house builds used beds of 3” cobbles in the crawlspace for the same reason - predictable heat release and turbulent airflow with minimal stagnation. These need to be slapped onto every single steam generator power plant on earth already in service, and two on every solar and wind installation.
This would be perfect to go with wind and solar generation, but what would the efficiency be for such a system?
@@mihir2781 The efficiency of resistance heaters is pretty darn close to 100%, mostly switching and line loss, but heat capacity of the materials drives input/output efficiency. Water can hold the most BTU per pound (other than obscure chemistry or phase change answers) of any storage medium, but only to the PV=NRT limits of water and container. Once you get up to a thousand degrees, efficiency is less important than stability, safety and ease of use.
Dumping excess wind, sun heat or PV wattage overboard is zero efficiency, so any amount of storage between demand cycles to level the grid is an improvement that makes wind and solar a viable solution and not a joke for trump rallies.
Yes!
Very encouraging.
As a ceramicist, I felt it necessary to say that the Rondo system is far from CO2 free in production unless the manufacture of the "Bricks" is conducted with renewable energy.
I'm sure they've done their calculations correctly but the manufacture of large ceramic objects that can withstand 1500 degrees is usually very heavy on energy input. I don't know of a concrete product that could withstand repeated exposure to such high temperatures.
As regards the degradation of the units, I can see that the ceramics (if that's what they call it) would not degrade through the expansion and contraction as long as the temperature is carefully manage to avoid the major physical change in silica (quartz inversion) at 573°C, notorious for destroying ceramic objects, particularly bulky objects like these.
The electric elements will suffer degradation far sooner than the brick.
I still think it's a serious move in the right direction and the promis of large scale production is really positive.
One of the nice things about this system is that it would have a lot of use in de-carbonization of concrete and refractory brick manufacture. If you put the plants in places like CA where there's a huge renewable energy surplus during the day, you can charge up the bricks. Even if the cement plant is using fossil fuels for its primary heating, they could swap over to the high temp air to reduce or eliminate emissions during the middle of the day. If they were using electrical heating for the thermal input, they could get even greater savings, as the plant could run off the grid during cheap renewable power periods and off the bricks during the night. Steel and other metal refining could see large carbon/cost savings with this tech with fairly modest changes to their infrastructure.
As for the electrical elements breaking down, I wonder if these bricks are microwave absorbers. If so, it might be possible to simply use magnetrons to heat them up through microwave transparent windows and keep all of the electronic components at more modest temperatures.
It is called Foundry Brick made for high temperatures.
Yes but the brick have to be made only once, then wee are good for decades on end :)
If 573°C is a critical temperature, how do they manage 1500°?
Maybe the ceramics they use are without Silicone?
Fondag concrete is good to 1100°C.
Solar thermal is the answer. I've been saying it for years. I'm prototyping a solar thermal platform right now. I will continue this relentless pursuit until I have a viable product for the market. It is proving the most challenging project I have ever endeavored to complete. I hope others will realize the potential along the way.
The falling cost of wind and solar PV has made it very challenging for solar thermal to compete. Also, in our market, we're targeting facilities where energy density is critical because they don't have excess land, so a large solar thermal plant would not be viable onsite. Also, when you transport heat over distances, you lose a lot of it, so it's important your heat generation is located close to where it's being consumed, which is why our energy dense batteries fit right onsite much like a gas-boiler does.
Some excellent ideas being implemented across Europe. Why can't the UK do something like this?
Because we’ve lost most of the subsidies that get them going :/
And too busy subsidising oil and gas
Highview Power are developing a cryogenic storage facility in the North West region of the UK
Brexit? Creativity flounders in rightwing environments. The left charges into the future, the right retreats into the past. Tell me if this isn't true.
Bureaucrats.
Dave, great and hopeful video, always welcome in my day, just a brief thank you. Cheers!
Now THAT's a solution!! Simple, easy to scale, and portable.
YES, but not portable haha.
Yes, old, time tested ideas that use simple ingredients are the solution. The thermos is such a brilliant container, I am so glad to see that there is lots of effort going into making better use of thermoses for energy storage
Simple ingredients, Simple bricks, Rondo Energy.
I didn't realise this until I started to look at who was producing thermal storage systems in the UK; these is a company called Caldera in the UK that is using vacuum as the insulation!
Well done bringing in the thermos and the brick.
It's good. In spite of all the bad stuff happening we have to keep pushing on with these positive measures and you never know we might just climb out of this hole we've got ourselves in.
Dave, this is super encouraging and needs to be massively scaled!! I live in Canada where we need to massively scale up the geo-thermal via closed loop use of old drilled gas and oil holes where pressurized water can be pumped into these shafts to be super-heated and returned to the surface to turn turbines for power generation. Would love to see an update for this and how it can be integrated into heat storage as well.
Canada is a great location for heat batteries, and we're engaging in multiple territories!
More people should know about the Drake Landing Solar Community in Okotoks, Alberta Canada. Solar energy captured in the summer to heat homes in the winter.
damn that pretty cool, I was thinking about doing something like this diy for the entire winter but i just decided to move to a warm country lol
How do they store the energy for half a year?
Just Have a Think is the winning formula for keeping up-to-date on important news for the climate! 🎉😊
Those 'bricks' look great! And good for Thailand staff as well!
Looks useful for very high temperature air. The specs for the RBH100 reveal an energy density similar to water. 13m x 10m x 10m for 100MWh is (I think) 280J/cm^3, the same as heating water by just under 70 degrees.
For something like district heating the water tank approach will be simpler and probably cheaper. Danish seasonal pit storage costs are available online (perhaps 35 EUR/m^3), and as the pit scales the losses are reduced (energy stored goes with the cube but the area of the tank is the square). In that case charging with solar thermal collectors or heat pumps will make more sense than burning the electricity.
The best is not to transform the energy, i.e. heat to movement. The problem is that storing heat for winter needs a lot of time, half a year. The lava from volcanos keeps hot during even years, only with the insulation of the same lava crust and because of the big size of the deposit. What about huge underground deposits of molten salts in order to take advantage or latent heat too? Or perhaps that is very expensive for large masses and then it is better to keep it in bricks, rocks, etc.?
Gracias
Essentially we are manually creating geothermal energy for a storage. Seems like we could combine it with direct geothermal energy and storage pretty easily and then you have both storage and production combined with easy swapping.
Early Geothermal energy plants suffered a slow but persistent loss of capacity over time (IIRC as the rock cooled), eventually resulting in either having to move the extraction point or close the plant. Has that issue been understood well enough now that we can use it long term?
Wow. Hot stuff indeed. One I learned about in my secondary school, some... lemme see... yeah, over forty years ago. Regenerators and recuperators, they are called in the trade.
Also, accumulative electric heaters, using special ceramic "bricks" heated by cheaper electricity during off-peak hours (aka "lower tariff" hours) have been around for even longer than that, so yeah, hot stuff. Like, really hot. Beam me up, Scotty... ;-)
Making the bricks must require energy, which must be included in the equations.
Everything manufactured has a cost, even handmade items, like my house. It's the depreciation rate and total life that is the measure of its final worthwhileness.
I asked my boss this and i think he said a Rondo Heat Battery recovers the carbon that was used to create it in less than a day of operating!
Loving that so many different people are coming up with different ways of storing energy. No one storage type will be the holy grail as each has its best use applications. Therefore the more types of storage come on line the better we will be.
More storage, fewer problems!
I am honored to be the same species as you sir, thank you for all you efforts to bring us good and bad news related to this global challenge we're facing.
If you by chance find projects that explicitly require money for us to invest/donate, I'd personally be extremely thrilled!
Thank you very much!
Thank you!!
It's always great to hear that despite the unhelpful actions of our idiot politicians, innovative businesses are just getting on with the energy transition via simple but hugely effective ideas like this.
It's great, yes. But it still needs political guidance, and unfortunately it's other businesses, like the dinosaur fossil fuel ⛽ companies that have the resources to -bribe- lobby politicians
Note that idiot businessmen purchase obedient politicians instead of brilliant statesmen.
I'm not denying that idiot politicians exist but I'm seeing plenty of US Democratic politicians paving the way for renewable energy solutions both at the state and Federal level. Incentive structures and political and regulatory support are key for entrepreneurial success and for getting to scale.
Politicians certainly do have a role to play, and we hope some of them watch this video =]
You seem to have an agenda against politicians, who are elected, and who, at least in the USA, have instigated an initiative that seems to be working.
Thank you 👍🏻
Simpler the better. This fits the need! Thanks for your work
1238pm ist on 23102023.
Rainfall since 10 minutes
engineering with rosie did a fantastic video on ceramic/aluminium heat batteries which was quite interesting!
Thank you, sir - these videos give me hope for the future!
Thank you. Brenmiller has a commercial heat storage solution as well, of fine gravel in shipping containers sized "batteries ".
Just a bigger version of the night storage units that gas replaced.
There is also cold storage. I went to an university where the air condionning system was using fresh air at night and off peak electricity to make ice, and using the ice to make cold air during the day. The heat pump was more efficient because the air was colder during the night. And electricity was cheaper at night. Ice storage is not expensive.
An important piece of the puzzle
Great stuff Dave..thank you.
My father was part of the design team at Bethlehem Steel for (what was then in 1962) the largest integrated steel making facility in the U.S. called Burns Harbor located in Michigan City, IN. They developed and implemented many innovations in the capture and re-use of waste heat in various parts of the operation. We visited that facility in 2019 for what was the 55th anniversary of rolling the first piece of plate steel off of the mill in 1964. The plant is still in operation today as part of the Cleveland-Cliffs company (stock ticker CLF).
For anyone who has never seen the process of making iron in a blast furnace and then converting it to steel in a basic oxygen furnace, and then turning it into basic steel products such as steel plate, hot rolled coil, nickel plated products, etc., it is truly awe-inspiring in scale. Unfortunately, it is also a major carbon generator, something the industry has been working to improve for decades.
This made me very happy. It was a good Thunk!
Fantastic clean batteries that work in current industrial systems...thank God for giving us brains! Roll them out!
blast furnaces for steelmaking have used the stacked brick method of heat exchange since forever. they have 3 separate blockhouses . the superhot gasses coming from the furnace go through 2 of the brickhouses while incoming air is heated by one. they alternate like every 20 minutes or so
Yes! that's why we chose refractory brick!
Great work!! THANKS !
Dude, I totally agree with you.
The more tools we have to fight for our survival, the better. ❤
I have been running propolene glycol, that is fermented fruit juice antifreeze through 100 sq.ft. liquid solar panels then through radiant tubing in floor for 25 years here in New Mexico. Works great. I use collectors from 1970s. Nobody makes a cheap steel version now.
Very exciting news! Thank you for mixing up the existential disaster and good news videos, my peace (or piece) of mind appreciates it, cheers!
The literal building block of their system is also one of the most energy intensive manufacturering processes. I wonder where their energy comes from to produce these bricks?
Sand is better.
Hi there, we recover the lifecycle emissions of our systems in only a few hours of operating! Bricks are actually not too energy intensive to create, especially when they're created using our own heat batteries instead of gas kilns!
@@rondoenergy4228 Glad to hear it will be possible to use heat from your storage system to create the bricks. I'd love to see if your thermal batteries could be usefully combined with absorption cooling.
So nice and refreshing to see stuff observing the KISS principle.
Back in the fortys mum used to put house bricks in the oven heated by the fire in the front room and wrapped in newspaper for hot water bottles,how forward thinking was that.
Short and sweet. Sounds great.
The difference between the sand and the ceramic bricks you covered here gets down to the thermal transport engineering differences.
Love your channel Dave!
When musk renamed twitter to X , I began promoting the idea that "tweets" need to be renamed "Xcretions".
Now ,my next task in the global ridiculing of musk is to suggest that anything with the prefix "giga" that isn't actually 1,000,000,000 times something , should be renamed "wanker" - as in wankerfactory or wankerpress.
One in the pink and one in the think! Happy Sunday, great show, thank you for your work!
I just really love your videos.
I end up informed... and 😎 relaxed.
Like your voice & your presentation style .... thank you!
This is same as Electrical storage heaters of 70's but on industry scale. This tech was discontinued since as better cheaper to maintain systems came about. If a brick or bricks brakeup in 5 -10 years airflow and efficiency will drop and become very expensive to replace faulty bricks.
I also wonder how can this survive 40 years with all these tiny fins in the bricks,
when you heat it up from like 80C to 1500C there has to be a lot of thermal expansion and shrinking going on, so it will likely crack....
You'll still have to produce the energy to heat these bricks. It's not decarbonization per say but optimization of renewable capacity.
Still super useful though 😊
We typically charge via off-grid wind and solar, and directly replace gas-boilers. =]
What a clever idea. A "simple, drop-in, zero emission replacement for industrial boilers, powered by fossil fuels." So instead of needing to rebuild an entire facility you could just take out the boilers and retrofit with this system. It seems like the only limiting factor is the availability of renewable energy, but you can still reduce emissions just by installing one of these units. And they say it lasts for 40 years, but you could probably get even more performance out of one by replacing the air circulation system and anything else that wears out but keeping the bricks. I like it.
Thank you. I am talking about heat batteries for more than a decade by now :) Nice to see finally they came true
We're here for you =]
The Berlin water energy storage tank looks like a small gasometer! Things go round in circles!
I want a few kilos of molten salt in my cellar in an insulated tank and a stirling cycle powered generator Someone need to mass produce this. Great channel. Never miss it.
That's very exciting. I wonder what the maximum charging power in these systems is, because taking advantage of high supply hours requires being able to charge fast
We rapidly charge, our smallest system the RHB100 charges with 20MWac.
Another very interesting video. Thank you.
Cheers Dave, great video and great news!
Again a very clear and pleasant presentation 🙂
Sounds like Finnish Polar Night Energy, but with bricks instead of sand
Good idea.
Seeing the Berlin Kettle, I immediately thought of all those old storage tanks for coal gas which litter our cities (Australia), and which have been sitting at ground level for years. I'm not suggesting that these could be used directly, just that maybe the sites could be readily converted. They may not be convenient to large scale wind or solar farms, but boy we sure have a lot of rooftop units, much of the output of which is probably currently dumped. Given the number of EV's going up in flames, I think that I'd rather sell my excess to such a scheme than to put a big Lithium battery anywhere near my house. As it stands, the rebate for solar is on a steady downward course here as daytime supply greatly exceeds demand.
A battery that looks promising. Thanks for sharing 🙏
Very interesting. Thanks for the great video!
Bring back domestic storage heaters.
I wondered about how they make the cement bricks as making cement produces 1/3 of global emissions. one of the articles on the companies website says they will use Rondo's energy system to make the bricks using green energy without most emission as well as partner to sell it to their own customers. This is really a great tech. How’s the ROI on a modular brick unit? In Canada it would be useful to make a system that uses wind and solar and geo combined with this brick generator to be used in new subdivisions. We now use heat pumps which are good but we can foresee electricity prices will go up and since in Canada BC area our wonderful hydro power stations will start being affected by drought and global electricity costs and a great increase in EV so we need to make some wise decisions in BC. They should partner with a big Canadian energy player like Suncor and the Federal government as we have lots of wind and sun for energy sources and government support. Why not license the technology and get it out faster globally? License it before some countries copy the technology as it doesn't look too complicated.
Just to be clear: these are not made of ordinary cement. They are "refractory bricks" according to Dave. These are far from a new thing (used in iron making for about a century, and you may remember storage heaters?)
The only thing new in the Rondo process is the funky shape of the bricks to maximise heat exchange with the gases that heat them up, and later with the gases used to take away the stored heat.
A Google search could me this info:
Refractory materials are those that can withstand high temperatures without the heat damaging their structure, resistance, or thermal conductivity. In the case of bricks, the chemical composition of refractories is different from that of regular bricks, which also influences their color and thermal conductivity.
Wonderful
Ain't human ingenuity great! So many great ideas that should have been funded, tested and rolled out years ago when we had the faintest chance of avoiding the Great Simplification. As things stand, I listen to these ideas, shrug and sigh. For most, it's 10 years of development before the technology would be ready to roll out, 15 before the infrastructure is in place to scale up production, and 20 before we start to see impacts. Time that we ain't got.
Still, it's always interesting to know about this stuff and contemplate what could have been.
Thanks again, Dave!
In the battle of ideas between Malthusians and Cornucopians, maybe it’s important to consider that there is some truth in both philosophies. On the one hand, we can’t over a couple of hundred years squander hundreds of millions of years worth of fossil fuels production by our planet, without any negative consequences. But on the other hand, to those who say it’s impossible to wean ourselves into a much, much lower fossil fuels diet, we can point to the ingenuity of humanity, and this very interesting example.
Thanks, Dave, for making us aware of these technologies. It’s good to have some optimism in an otherwise doom and gloom TH-cam environment, with the skeptics making ridiculous claims about how higher levels of CO2 are great, because “plant food”, while on the their hand real scientists explain about potential upcoming tipping points.
High input costs are probably the reason why low-energy heat is not used more. Unfortunately, even waste heat from nuclear power plants is not used today. Only about 30% of nuclear fission energy is converted into electricity. About 60% of this huge energy escapes as waste heat. There are only a minimum of projects where waste heat is used to heat cities. This is where it should start. One such new project was completed this year at the Temelin nuclear power plant in the Czech Republic after years of planning.
Thanks for nice videos!
There are other benefits. A lot of commercial processes need to run 24/7. Rondo reckon 5 hours of solar power is enough to run the plant 24 hours. In situations where there is a queue to be connected to the grid, this can be bypassed by colocating solar panels.
If they have surplus, the heat can be used to generate electricity allowing them to arbitrage price differences.
A good way to kill the dünkelflaute. (Windless nights)
YES!
I love this one!
With this and other heat transfer technologies I always wonder why it hasn't been done already. if this can be done surely all the excess heat produce in foundries and other metal work facilities could be used in a similar way on traditional industries without the need of a battery that is heated just for that purpose
Basically it comes down to a need - heat storage has been used for a long time to capture excess heat in foundries (glassworks comes to mind) but mostly just for heat-to-heat (heat input and heat output) - or more recently for CSP (Solar) heat-to-electricity. In both cases you have limited temperature for input so it doesn't get quite hot enough for purpose. Using electricity-to-electricity for thermal storage is incredibly wasteful (compared to lithium-ion batteries or pumped hydro etc) and prior to now just wasn't economically viable given that you're only recovering around 30-40% of the electricity (aka round-trip efficiency).
Why it's so viable now is because electricity has become so cheap on renewable dense grids - there's places in the US midwest where the price of electricity is negative 30% of the time. So now, even if you're only recovering 30-40% of that power it's still hugely profitable if your capital expenditure to store it is low enough. These batteries cost roughly a tenth to build and maintain than a lithium battery of similar capacity, and so you're CapEx is so low that you don't really care about round-trip efficiency.
How do they produce the cement for the bricks? Isn’t that a very heat intensive process that, at this time, is still very much relying on fossil fuels?
Thank you ……
I love to just have a look at just have a think. Another excellent video!!!
Portland Cement production requires heating limestone to 1400 degrees Celsius. This sounds like a good fit. I wonder if you could replace these bricks with limestone instead.
Excellent video!!
The big water thermos in Berlin reminded me of the giant aquarium that bursted there.
This is a very good idea.