Rondo Energy’s 100 MWh heat battery, powered by 20 MW of on-site solar energy, can store industrial heat or use cheap electricity from the grid generated during sunny and windy hours, the company said.
Rondo Energy has announced that a 100 MWh thermal battery it installed in California, powered solely by 20 MW of on-site, off-grid solar energy, is operating automatically daily.
The thermal battery will continuously supply high-pressure heat and steam to a Holmes Western oil plant and is the first large-scale commercial project of its kind, the company said. The heat battery works in conjunction with gas-fired boilers in the facility.
Rondo’s heat storage medium uses “only brick and wire”, according to the company, and stores heat at more than 1,000 C with a claimed return efficiency of more than 97%.
The bricks used in a heat battery, known as refractory bricks, are developed from common materials, researchers at Stanford University said in a recent study. paperand can be heated to high temperatures with electrical resistance heating.
The image below shows the process of charging and discharging a heat battery, where the electricity source can be off-grid renewable energy sources or off-grid electricity.
Rondo’s heat battery charges “using only the six cheapest hours of electricity per day,” the company said in a statement, “whether from off-grid solar or from the grid.” In electricity systems around the world, “cheap hours of electricity are becoming available, thanks to the use of solar and wind energy.”
The Stanford researchers predicted that refractory heat storage technology will be used to store energy for industrial process heat in a 100% renewable energy system, due to its cost advantages over battery storage for that use. In the 100% renewable scenario, the researchers expected the refractory system capacity for industrial process heat in the United States to reach 2.6 TWh, with a peak discharge of 170 GW.
Andy Lubershane, a partner at Energy Impact Partners, which has invested in Rondo Energy, said heat batteries will “open up” a major new market for renewable electricity, namely industrial heat, which he said accounts for about a quarter of global energy consumption.
Last year, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) entered into negotiations with Diageo North America for a grant of up to $75 million for the installation of Rondo thermal batteries at two sites, which will be powered by on-site renewable energy sources. The DOE’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations said the projects could provide “a highly replicable blueprint” for other industrial facilities to achieve direct decarbonization. Rondo and Diageo are still in discussions about the projects, a Rondo spokesperson said.
Rondo is developing three projects in Europe and one in Southeast Asia, the spokesperson said.
The 100 MWh plant in California has 10,000 times the capacity of a typical residential heating system, the company said.
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