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.
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.
Very clever!
It's fun to compare and contrast strategies, as startups explore and define the problem space.
For example:
Fourth Power is a heat to electricity solution. It uses graphite bricks (up to 2400°C), liquid metal for plumbing, and thermophotovoltaic cells.
https://gofourth.com/our-technology/
Electrified Thermal Solutions is an electricity to heat solution. It combines the heating element, storage, and exchanger into a single brick (up to 1800°C).
I'm wondering if anyone has done the math for a cement plant in the southwest surrounded by PV solar.
Typically, but may no longer be true with renewables. I don't think any of solar pv, wind, and hydro generates significant heat in the process of their power generation.
Storing energy as heat is dead simple, cheap, can let you store huge amounts of energy, and you can store for fairly long timespans.
It doesn’t matter that you can’t feed power back to the grid (well, maybe you can.. you can convert the light given off the heated block with photovoltaics.. but that won’t be a huge factor). If we decarbonise industrial heat it will create enough demand for renewables that the minimum output of renewables (over a larger area, I think it’s fair to assume some grid improvements over the next years) will be more than enough to cover base load needs. We will probably have quite a lot of batteries for frequency regulation and smoothing out the duck curve. Some of that will also help with dunkelflaute. But mainly there will just be so much renewables that the output never goes below what is needed on a given day.
There’s so many aspects of decarbonisation that makes balancing the grid easier. Electric cars is another example, where a lot of people will have flexibility of delaying or being proactive with charging based on electricity price forecasts. I expect most rental car companies will provide some grid balancing services, and in the near future you’ll have to pay extra to check out a car with 100% SoC.
FWIW there are a few other comments in this page discussing TPV (albeit briefly) and there are at least a few companies seriously pursuing it with federal support. It is a pretty interesting alternative to other forms ESS, particularly for long duration (ie more relevant for critical resiliency applications than supply/demand arbitrage). Like you said probably will not end up super relevant in the grand scheme of the grid’s total ESS capacity, but it will most likely have a niche I think.
> I expect most rental car companies will provide some grid balancing services, and in the near future you’ll have to pay extra to check out a car with 100% SoC.
Rental car companies are an interesting example I hadn’t thought of before - thanks for highlighting that. Another more common challenge/opportunitu will be campuses - eg universities, large corporations, etc which have their own microgrid (often a CHP/district system in the northeast at least) - which may have a large number of commuters arriving in the morning and potentially wanting to charge their EVs all day. In 15 years, this might represent a pretty significant increase in demand, and represents giving a pretty substantial amount of free electricity to commuters (if things stayed as they are today). At the same time, charging up all of those vehicles during midday and then sending them home to immediately discharge when they plug in at 5-7pm could substantially abate the duck curve, and being an even larger further savings for the commuter. Seems obvious that some sort of new agreements/contracts etc will come in to play for these sorts of campuses.
I didn't spot any mention of voltage requirements for that so maybe it requires so high voltage that cause it to be a bit harder to actually use.
- Heat pumps typically achieve better than 100% efficiency, though at modest temperatures (slightly above ambient room temperatures), and would be better suited to most space-heating applications.
- The key achievement of the described technology is very high temperature applications, such as metals smelting, though what advantages the described tech has over existing electric arc furnaces (utilising graphite electrodes, cheap and abundant and capable of 3,000 °C temps) is less than clear.
except there are many types of heat pump in this world that routinely achieve well above 100% efficiency, since pumping heat from a cold heat bath to a hot one can cost significantly less energy than generating that heat resistively.
The distinguishing feature to call these "conductive" is that you could make a kiln of these bricks and ordinary bricks, and the current should preferentially pass through the conductive ones. Some of the current will leak through every other available path, including the air, but that's true of every circuit in existence. Vacuum isn't supposed to conduct, but vacuum tubes pass current through it, don't they?
Yeah, but how do you make a copper wire heat up without also heating up the wiring that leads to that copper wire? You can make it thinner, but these bricks aren't very thin.
