A thermal battery that uses superheated bricks [video]
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Electricity is used to heat up bricks. Bricks store heat for very long durations. Bricks transfer heat to other systems for industrial heating such as boiling chemicals or steam ironing clothes.
This replaces the fossil fuels used for industrial heat.
It's a heat storage system. Before water is used. Now we can use bricks.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coefficient_of_performance
Refer to it as COP or as moving 3 units of heat for one unit of input.
You can't kill what is already dead.
The right question is how much heat escapes? This will depend on time, and they seem to be claiming 12 hours effectiveness which would seem to imply half of the heat escapes at max storage somewhere between 3 and 24 hours.
It depends on both time and how full it is. Possibly also how full it has recently been as well in the case where it is filled unevenly to reduce loss.
Without anything more specific than '1% loss a day' from their marketing copy, it's difficult to say, but probably "about 90% in typical use" if you want to be even more reductive than that rather than encouraging clear communication.
2)The video is nothing more than a dressed up zoom "interview" with the CEO and some stock video clips. Everything should be assumed to have been written by, or at least thoroughly vetted by, Rondo.
3)For example, the claim is that lithium ion batteries are expensive at grid scale...but the cost of such batteries continues to fall, there's now commercially viable recycling for them, and other technologies such as iron-flow are cheaper, do not require rare-earth metals, and are already in the commercial marketplace. So is pumped hydro, which they also don't address.
4)The immediate and pretty obvious drawback to their "dynamic insulation" concept: if you stop pumping air through the "battery", the insulation that is rated to only handle 150C is suddenly exposed to thousands of degrees...and now you have a fire, backed by an enormous thermal mass, which is a problem, as firefighting is largely based on using the phase change of water to pull more heat away from a fire than the fire can generate.
5)While this tech sounds nice for industrial processes, it's not anywhere near as practical for domestic heating, where geothermal heat pumps will be more efficient. At its core, this is a system that is fueled by resistive heating, and heat pumps are several times more efficient than resistive heating.
What would be interesting is if they're able to leverage solar radiation directly via solar concentrators. You'd see a roughly four-fold increase in efficiency over solar.
> While this tech sounds nice for industrial processes, it's not anywhere near as practical for domestic heating, where geothermal heat pumps will be more efficient.
A family member had a heat storage system that used electricity to heat bricks about a decade ago. Worked great for home heating with time-of-day rates (especially with some solar to offset the peak rate daytime). And the purchase cost was very low, unlike any sort of ground source heat pump.
The rate at which they have been falling has been diminishing for quite some time, until this year when they are starting to rise (more than inflation).
The idea that past price movements will always continue indefinitely has zero basis in reality.
And yes li-ion batteries are way too expensive for large scale grid usage, even if they did fall at 10% yearly we would be decades away for them to be a satisfactory solution.
This is true. Any pretend exponential curve is at best a logistic curve near the beginning or middle.
But there are good reasons to think batteries as a whole are in the class of logistic curves near the middleish.
There are lots of chemistries in the 500-1000Wh/kg range with various deal-breakers making them not an option. Chemical reactions go up to about 10,000Wh/kg and some of them as yet undiscovered might resemble 'battery' more than 'fuel cell' or 'magic portable nuclear thingy'.
Simple few component mass produced objects made of abundant materials once every ounce of cleverness in production is wrung out tend to cost around $1-10/kg plus their energy cost.
So if we set the upper asymptote at around $1-10/kWh, old technologies are around $1000 per usable kWh and LiFePO4 is around $300/kWh for final products you can actually buy.
It seems reasonable to posit that $20/kWh is achievable before going too far past the inflection point. This is in line with CATL claiming $60/kWh for SIB in the late 2020s, then having costs taper off and settle around $30/kWh in 2040 as the low hanging fruit are all gone. Maybe there'll be a new discovery around then that pushes it down to $1, but it seems unlikely.
This is a commonly defined material property [1]. You would simply size your bricks to suit the situation - given same volume, more surface area means faster heat flow.
Demand responsive electrical heat is a solid proven tech, it's only going to expand across industrial sectors via innovations like this. I see no need to talk about perceived lithium battery deficiencies. Bill Gates gets mentioned and he seems a repeat offender in this regard.
What method are they using to extract energy from the bricks that's as efficient as lithium-ion discharging?
edit: I misspoke, 27% of greenhouse gas emissions are asserted to be from industrial heating applications, not 27% of energy use.
Like, there is some merit in say heating up the "heat battery" at peak solar power (or just when grid energy is cheapest) then using that to heat directly but... you're still doing it at 100% efficiency while heat pump does that at 200-300% using nothing but ambient temperature to get that efficiency.
I guess you could use it as a hybrid solution with heat pump for very cold climates that would normally disqualify heat pumps (heat the brick during the day, use heat pump to get the heat back) but even that is kinda meh.
Thermal storage is one way to execute. Buy solar power when it's cheap at noon and use it for heating at midnight when power is expensive.
Actually it is the complete opposite, wind and solar create a huge PROBLEM with its unreliable fluctuating output.
This is basically going back to the old way of heating homes: When energy is cheap, heat a giant thermal mass. When energy is expensive, leach the heat to other areas where it’s needed.
In the old days this would be a giant brick or clay stove that would heat up during the day (when people are awake to tend the fire) and radiate heat to keep the building warm through the night.
I’m the modern version it’s likely steam pipes heated by the mass that bring the heat to wherever it’s useful (whether that’s an industrial kiln or a home’s radiators). That cycle can be extremely efficient, but you obviously only get heat, not electricity.
It’s probably a good thing to do in some contexts but if I understand it right I’m not sure I’d call it innovative.
It could be interesting in niches like say have some thermal storage (that say gets recharged at peak solar) for heating water on demand instead of draining battery for that, but that's a lot of extra complexity to save on some more batteries
My comment probably shouldn’t have even mentioned home radiators.
https://norwegianscitechnews.com/2021/04/developing-the-worl...
That's a bit short of the 1000°C that Rondo's system promises, so these approaches are useful for very different applications.
It's not nothing, but getting close to the theoretical limit tends to be incredibly annoying when it comes to thermodynamics. Typically it requires doing stuff extremely slowly (so you're always close to thermal equilibrium), which means it's nowhere near fast enough or you need almost perfect insulation etc.
Say, I have a heatpump that heats up water to 100°C at ambient temperature of 10°C. Couldn't I feed that hot water into another heat pump that heats up water to 200°C and so on?
You can make heat pumps 10x more efficient by using 10x smaller increments of temperature, but then you also need to pump each unit of heat 10 times so in the end it doesn't cost less energy to make a bigger temperature gradient.
The problem is at step two you have three units of heat, two of which came from ambient heat.
At step three you have 4.5 units of heat, two of which came from ambient heat.
Step five there are 6.75..and so on.
You're expending a lot of energy moving energy you put in so you get diminishing returns.
The theoretical limit is T_hot / T_change (in absolute units like kelvin). If your change is roughly the hot temperature, there's no benefit.
Have a big brick or water thing inside. Heat it while it is sunny with a heat pump.
Hell you could even melt a few tons of sodium acetate during summer and use it for december/january
Since it's a very high temperature device, much of the heat transfer going on is through thermal radiation.
Better to have some hot bricks being used for heating i the industries, even with lower efficiency, than having to supply the same thermal energy by storing it as electricity in some chemical battery.
Multipronged approaches are the only way for humans to become more energy-efficient.
Another option might be concentrated solar power.
The innovation of their technology is in how they solve the problem. Watch the video.
Which is great! I didn't say it wasn't. But the title and first half of the video,and half of the comments here, make it sound like it's a replacement for electrical batteries, which it isn't.
For example, video compares this to gravitational storage (pumping water back up for hydro plants) which makes no sense, as you don't get electricity back out of this.
So, yes, clever use of tech. The video is fanboyism to the 11th and instead of allowing the tech to stand on it's own two feet, goes very close to actually be misinformative.