What method are they using to extract energy from the bricks that's as efficient as lithium-ion discharging?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.