Between this and the newer co2 reduction technologies in kilns we might be close to finding ways to build combined steel and cement factories that have massively reduced greenhouse gas emissions.
If you want to do that you'd be better off using parabolic mirrors to heat regular fire bricks directly.
These are unique it seems because they're durable electric heating elements that can hit industrial process temperatures and might be cheaper then alternatives?
You can also easily move electrical power long distances but parabolic mirrors are hard to integrate into existing industrial processes and locations. PV electricity is competitive with fossil fuels even if you ultimately just want heat.
Solar thermal is far more viable for low grade heat. Especially as energy storage is fairly trivial.
It seems like an huge advantage to use an 80% thermal setup vs a 22% efficient panel, but we gave up on solar power towers for a bunch of reasons. With PV things are a lot more straightforward because you can reach nearly any temperature at equal efficiency.
If we are talking primarily about storage, what are the advantages of a PV field + 1400 C brick storage vs parabolic + 500C storage?
The argument for storing at 1500C could be 500C is useless not just worse economically.
The goal isn’t thermal storage the goal is to do something that needs extreme temperature.
You can’t melt steel at 500C, you can melt it in bricks at 1500C that then cool to 1400C. Use electricity to heat a brick to 1500C and you get 100C worth of energy storage. Use solar thermal to get to 1400C and you get zero energy storage.
Im skeptical that they would be improvement on other forms of grid power storage.
This is independent of the question if they are good for melting steel.
I guess I dont understand the point you are advocating for.
The total energy storage is also unlikely to be huge so it’s more like load management not really grid storage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_management IE: Because we have energy storage and other users don’t we can cut demand when prices spike. Utilities will cut special rates for companies that allow the utility to load shed them first.
The same basic concept is common in other areas. Get enough storage for ~free such as with an EV and you can simply wait until prices get cheap before charging.
Grandparent:
> These are unique it seems because they're durable electric heating elements that can hit industrial process temperatures and might be cheaper then alternatives?
Storage usually makes less sense, but depends on capital cost per kW-hr right? No idea on the economics of that, but an electric heater can get hotter than solar thermal and use much less space at the point of use.
They are durable electric heating elements that can get hotter than solar thermal and hit industrial temperatures without using fossil fuels to heat locally with fire.
IF you just want to go electricity>heat>electricity Industrial Arc furnaces can go to 2000 C (and much higher but they have no industrial need).
I would love to be wrong.
I think the idea here is to go electricity->heat-storage->heat-usage, using the heat storage to take advantage of cheap renewables that might be otherwise curtailed and to buffer the heat to provide reliability for whatever process it is used for.
Almost any form of energy storage other than heat (i.e. batteries, hydrogen, gravity) would be far more expensive in that use case. By comparison, bricks are an incredibly cheap way to store heat.
If packaged correctly this could also be useful for uses like ovens at industrial bakeries, which have highly predictable energy use patterns.
Another example of a big application for time-shifted heating is domestic hot water heating with heat pump water heaters (or even resistance water heaters if the electricity is cheap enough). At least one company (https://www.harvest-thermal.com/) is taking this further to also provide space heating by time-shifting heat, again using water as the energy storage technology.
That doesn't make sense. Why would anyone use them instead of the more efficient alternatives? For artistic reasons?
>They only need to be cheaper than (IMO inevitable) carbon tax penalties plus the cost of these bricks compared to current methods, which is a rapidly falling curve.
this clearly indicates OP suggests they will become de facto cheaper once the traditionally externalized costs of environmental impact are accounted for.
The comparison is between this and carbon free solar-thermal for energy storage. Saying it doesnt have to be cheaper than solar-thermal simply isnt true.
There are no moving parts in PV or these bricks, which means they'll have near-zero maintenance costs.
Also I'm pretty sure solar thermal can't heat steel - it relies on steel pipes throughout the entire system.