It's nothing to do with slices of bread. The scale of this tech is in a completely different ball park. A new brick-toasting heat storage device, is so cheap and efficient that it makes decarbonization a complete no-brainer across the industrial sector: where 25 percent of humanity’s carbon emissions come from. It's very promising, and Bill Gates has just pumped a slug of money into the process. The end game? To cut CO2 emissions by 15 percent in 15 years.
A quarter of Earth's man-made carbon emissions come from industrial energy requirements and an enormous proportion of that energy goes into creating heat for various industrial processes. That's where brick toasters come into play.
Rondo Energy, who came up with this potentially planet saving device, says that this is a slam-dunk opportunity to decarbonize in a way that pays for itself spectacularly quickly. So, no reason for anybody to claim it's not cost effective in the short term.
“We are at a spectacular moment in history,” Rondo CEO John O’Donnell said. “Wind and solar power are now cheaper than fuel. Not just cheaper than conventional electricity, but cheaper than fuel for heat in most of the world – headed for all the world.”
This means in essence the “green premium,” that had plagued the renewable energy sector, now is no longer a problem. Thus, the main reason industrial heat consumers balked at decarbonizing... was the ‘green premium.”
The new barrier to changing to clean energy is that there is no way to run a factory 24/7 on intermittent energy delivery (is the sun shining? is the wind blowing?) unless you can store the energy.
Rondo Energy is building “brick toasters” that store cheap renewable energy as high-temperature heat, ready to be deployed throughout the day. Rondo states that industrial clients will begin saving money compared to the old, dirty, fossil-fuel burning processes immediately.
These stoves are made up of simple clay bricks, sometimes with a bit of sand thrown in, but not anything specialized or even exotic. The company claims it can pull the voluminous heat back out at an extraordinary 98 percent efficiency, resulting in dirt-cheap industrial heat storage, that costs “about one-fifth the cost per unit of energy stored as any electrochemical battery,” according to O’Donnell.
The first generation of Rondo brick toasters are optimized for low cost, super-fast deployment and scale, and are capable of holding heat up to 1500 C (2,732 F) which O’Donnell says can cover approximately 80 percent of industrial heat requirements globally.
Right now, Rondo is bringing this technology to its first customers and will be in the USA soon.