A quarter of all energy humans use comes in the form of heat for high-temperature industrial processes. Industrial heat has long been considered "difficult to decarbonize," but a new class of thermal batteries promises to harness renewable energy to the task. I talk with one of the entrepreneurs involved.
What a terrific podcast. The concepts are fascinating, the market opportunities are as big as anything the energy world has seen so far, and John O’Donnell is exceptionally knowledgeable and articulate.
Highly instructive. For the first time, I feel a sense of hope for humanity as we try to conquer climate warming.
Not sure if Dr Volts takes requests or where to add them, but I’m hoping for a deep dive into Canada’s recently announced 2023 budget billed as Canada’s response to the US IRA, perhaps with an interview of someone from the Canadian Climate Institute or the David Suzuki Foundation.
Us old solar thermal folks always installed thermal storage.
Anyway, good stuff. Perhaps, if reason might prevail in rural America, some coupling new heat-intensive industry with wind/solar farms could "short circuit" one of the objections to directly harvesting the wind and sun. The objection being that solar farms in particular actually decrease local employment by laying off tractor drivers and other ag biz supply chain workers, while maintenance hours on the solar panels are minimal.
At this point, I am not sanguine about reason prevailing in the resident activists and local and state government response to them in rural America. But I would really like to be wrong!
We really need that surplus of renewables to actually get built; there don't seem to be many places in the USA where this is the case, but you mentioned a few. And it seems the charging of the heat will require such big chunks of grid capacity that any spare capacity will be gone after one or two projects if they are at all remote from the VRE generation. Not insurmountable, but the mandarins of the grids do not seem to be "skating to where the puck will be," an apt phrase.
I wonder if it makes sense to put district steam grids on this. Denver, in particular. Supposedly CO is curtailing wind and utility solar a bit already. But that may be due to transmission constraints and inflexible baseload coal plants, not under-utilization in the metro area. District heat is not a constant all year load, but Xcel owns the transmission from the plains, some of the VRE generation, and that steam grid. This would be a more efficient utilization of "surplus" VRE than making H2 to inject into the gas grid. And no H2O consumption.
But the PUC gets a lot of conflicting input and "skating to where the puck will be" is a very tough call for the regulators.
Before anyone scolds me, yes we should be deploying HPs faster because of the 300% efficiency improvement, and with low-temperature storage, and with demand response. But from what I can see, there are many building owners who would rather pay extra per Btu for "clean heat," versus absorbing the capital expense of converting from steam to low/medium temp HW and finding places to install HPs, and getting dinged for new peak demands, or maintaining gas backup, etc.
In 2016 the grid serving an aluminum smelter in Australia crashed and it took months or years and cost tens or hundreds or millions of bucks in lost time, etc. But as part of ensuring it wouldn't happen again, that Aussie grid installed perhaps its first big (100 MW, not sure of hours) Tesla megapack battery in 2017. Plans are currently afoot to connect that smelter to offshore wind and revise the "potline" process to allow for variable production and electricity consumption. Of course some politicians blamed variable renewables for the problem, but they have been left in the dust there. For now. As opposed to the USA GOP.
Any process manufacturing could be impacted, if you have a brief interruption in a food or medication processing line you could end up out of safety compliance and need to bring down the system to re-certify health and safety before restarting (also, discard that batch). The time to purge and clean the line before re-certification adds up and each stage needs to be checked before the whole line restarts; all this before one considers potential damage to the processing line's equipment due to the blip. Some processing machines have multi-year cycle times. Even simple power blip disruptions are very... disruptive when you have a planned 7-year uninterrupted duty cycle. How is that even a thing? Resilience against power failure is a top feature for equipment like this (https://www.buhlergroup.com/content/buhlergroup/global/en/products/cracking_mill.html) and with asset lifetimes of 30 years not every piece of equipment on the plant floor is sufficiently automated to protect itself in a failure condition.
Any manufacturing at all could be impacted because physical systems carry momentum and respond to chemistry; a brief interruption in control can cause physical consequences (e.g. cause damage to the machines themselves). Even hitting the stops hard can void the calibration and result in improper function that is slow to detect and fix.
Nominally you'd FMEA that to ensure appropriate redundancies and safe shutdown paths to avoid harms (to customers, the facility, and operations). Despite that, sometimes you get a control message out of order and destroy a very expensive piece of equipment. This is a vote against a drop-in technology swap like that discussed in the conversation. OT managers are reluctant to introduce changes to systems that work well enough already. Waiting on an upgrade cycle is very slow (I've seen facilities using 100+ year old machines because... it still did the job). It isn't a coincidence that refractory bricks are the basis for Rondo's technology, they are trying to deploy into a highly risk-averse environment.
The thing that I Iiked about this was that Rondo Energy brings a solar farm with it to power its thermal storage system. Mr. O'Donnell does not go to where there is renewable energy, because, if you can do solar in Sweden, then you can do solar anywhere.
This sure seems like something that would scale to a small grid system for both heat and electric generation, like a small community - or even a small regional cooperative, here in the US or especially elsewhere in the "developing" world.
Sincere question…The term “battery” was used by saying “thermal battery”. I thought by definition, a battery was a chemical energy storage device. All other forms of energy storage use phrases such as “thermal energy storage”, “hydro energy storage”, or “geothermal energy storage”.
Am I mistaken or is any energy storage device a battery?
What a terrific podcast. The concepts are fascinating, the market opportunities are as big as anything the energy world has seen so far, and John O’Donnell is exceptionally knowledgeable and articulate.
Highly instructive. For the first time, I feel a sense of hope for humanity as we try to conquer climate warming.
Not sure if Dr Volts takes requests or where to add them, but I’m hoping for a deep dive into Canada’s recently announced 2023 budget billed as Canada’s response to the US IRA, perhaps with an interview of someone from the Canadian Climate Institute or the David Suzuki Foundation.
Us old solar thermal folks always installed thermal storage.
Anyway, good stuff. Perhaps, if reason might prevail in rural America, some coupling new heat-intensive industry with wind/solar farms could "short circuit" one of the objections to directly harvesting the wind and sun. The objection being that solar farms in particular actually decrease local employment by laying off tractor drivers and other ag biz supply chain workers, while maintenance hours on the solar panels are minimal.
At this point, I am not sanguine about reason prevailing in the resident activists and local and state government response to them in rural America. But I would really like to be wrong!
We really need that surplus of renewables to actually get built; there don't seem to be many places in the USA where this is the case, but you mentioned a few. And it seems the charging of the heat will require such big chunks of grid capacity that any spare capacity will be gone after one or two projects if they are at all remote from the VRE generation. Not insurmountable, but the mandarins of the grids do not seem to be "skating to where the puck will be," an apt phrase.
I wonder if it makes sense to put district steam grids on this. Denver, in particular. Supposedly CO is curtailing wind and utility solar a bit already. But that may be due to transmission constraints and inflexible baseload coal plants, not under-utilization in the metro area. District heat is not a constant all year load, but Xcel owns the transmission from the plains, some of the VRE generation, and that steam grid. This would be a more efficient utilization of "surplus" VRE than making H2 to inject into the gas grid. And no H2O consumption.
But the PUC gets a lot of conflicting input and "skating to where the puck will be" is a very tough call for the regulators.
Before anyone scolds me, yes we should be deploying HPs faster because of the 300% efficiency improvement, and with low-temperature storage, and with demand response. But from what I can see, there are many building owners who would rather pay extra per Btu for "clean heat," versus absorbing the capital expense of converting from steam to low/medium temp HW and finding places to install HPs, and getting dinged for new peak demands, or maintaining gas backup, etc.
"There are processes where if they get a half-second interruption in their energy supply, it takes a week to restart the process."
Seems almost inconceivable.
In 2016 the grid serving an aluminum smelter in Australia crashed and it took months or years and cost tens or hundreds or millions of bucks in lost time, etc. But as part of ensuring it wouldn't happen again, that Aussie grid installed perhaps its first big (100 MW, not sure of hours) Tesla megapack battery in 2017. Plans are currently afoot to connect that smelter to offshore wind and revise the "potline" process to allow for variable production and electricity consumption. Of course some politicians blamed variable renewables for the problem, but they have been left in the dust there. For now. As opposed to the USA GOP.
Any process manufacturing could be impacted, if you have a brief interruption in a food or medication processing line you could end up out of safety compliance and need to bring down the system to re-certify health and safety before restarting (also, discard that batch). The time to purge and clean the line before re-certification adds up and each stage needs to be checked before the whole line restarts; all this before one considers potential damage to the processing line's equipment due to the blip. Some processing machines have multi-year cycle times. Even simple power blip disruptions are very... disruptive when you have a planned 7-year uninterrupted duty cycle. How is that even a thing? Resilience against power failure is a top feature for equipment like this (https://www.buhlergroup.com/content/buhlergroup/global/en/products/cracking_mill.html) and with asset lifetimes of 30 years not every piece of equipment on the plant floor is sufficiently automated to protect itself in a failure condition.
Any manufacturing at all could be impacted because physical systems carry momentum and respond to chemistry; a brief interruption in control can cause physical consequences (e.g. cause damage to the machines themselves). Even hitting the stops hard can void the calibration and result in improper function that is slow to detect and fix.
Nominally you'd FMEA that to ensure appropriate redundancies and safe shutdown paths to avoid harms (to customers, the facility, and operations). Despite that, sometimes you get a control message out of order and destroy a very expensive piece of equipment. This is a vote against a drop-in technology swap like that discussed in the conversation. OT managers are reluctant to introduce changes to systems that work well enough already. Waiting on an upgrade cycle is very slow (I've seen facilities using 100+ year old machines because... it still did the job). It isn't a coincidence that refractory bricks are the basis for Rondo's technology, they are trying to deploy into a highly risk-averse environment.
Inspiring company and interview. Would like to hear more about the ‘box’ and its insulation.
I think this was one your best podcasts so far. Maybe another one with Harvest Thermal. They are doing the same for home heating.
The thing that I Iiked about this was that Rondo Energy brings a solar farm with it to power its thermal storage system. Mr. O'Donnell does not go to where there is renewable energy, because, if you can do solar in Sweden, then you can do solar anywhere.
This sure seems like something that would scale to a small grid system for both heat and electric generation, like a small community - or even a small regional cooperative, here in the US or especially elsewhere in the "developing" world.
Sincere question…The term “battery” was used by saying “thermal battery”. I thought by definition, a battery was a chemical energy storage device. All other forms of energy storage use phrases such as “thermal energy storage”, “hydro energy storage”, or “geothermal energy storage”.
Am I mistaken or is any energy storage device a battery?