Good News, Bad News As Rondo Energy 100 MWh Heat Storage Facility Goes Live – CleanTechnica

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First the good news. Rondo Energy has developed technology that uses electricity — preferably from renewable energy sources — to heat fire bricks to temperatures of 1500º C or more. Unlike most energy storage, the Rondo Energy system is not primarily meant to provide electricity for the grid when the sun goes down or the wind stops blowing. Instead, it is meant to decarbonize the process heat used in industries as diverse as dairy products and cement. Today that process heat is usually created by burning fossil fuels.

The Rondo process turns low cost, intermittent electricity into heat using electric heaters which the company claims convert electrical energy into heat at 100% efficiency. When heat is needed, air flows up through the stack of superheated bricks until it reaches 1000° C or more. The heat delivery rate is adjusted easily by changing air flow and heat at the outlet and is delivered at exactly the desired temperature via automated AI patented controls, the company says.

The air is eventually recycled back through the system, minimizing heat loss and maximizing efficiency. The Rondo system delivers heat at the exact temperature and pressure needed to meet the demands
of industry customers. The heat battery is easily integrated into existing infrastructure and is a drop-in, zero emission replacement for conventional boilers.

The Not So Good News From Rondo Energy

Now the bad news, or the not quite so good news, if you prefer. The first 100 MWh Rondo Energy system is now operational in Kern County, California, where it is supplied with zero emission electricity by a 20 MW solar installation. However, the heat from the system is being used by Holmes Western Oil for its enhanced oil recovery system, according to a report by Michelle Ma for Bloomberg.

Environmentalists are quite unhappy with the news. They argue that deploying clean tech to produce fossil fuels prolongs the life of the nation’s carbon emitting infrastructure. However, Andy Lubershane of Energy Impact Partners, which is partnering with Rondo Energy on this project, views things differently.

He told Ma that for clean tech startups like Rondo, “it’s hard to find a customer to do your first commercial project. Having a partner like Holmes that has an interest in decarbonization” is critical to scaling any new technology. Overall, using renewables and a heat battery lowers the carbon footprint of Holmes’ entire process.

Holmes also gets the benefit of the California Low Carbon Fuel Standard, which regulates oil and gas producers in the state. That fuel standard has helped companies that produce some of the most carbon intensive oil in the US to continue operating, Bloomberg said. It includes a carve-out for local drillers to generate credits for using “innovative crude oil production methods” that cut emissions at the well site.

By replacing natural gas with the solar and battery system, the oil company avoids 13,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually while lowering its costs, according to Rondo founder and chief innovation officer John O’Donnell. “It is absolutely a moral necessity to decarbonize every single part of our economy,” and producing oil locally produces fewer emissions than shipping it in tankers across the ocean. “Uncertainty is the enemy of infrastructure,” and developers building long term projects need consistent business conditions, O’Donnell added.

The avoided emissions allow the company to generate environmental credits, which can be sold or used to offset its own excess emissions. Holmes itself declined a request from Bloomberg for comment.

Other climate tech startups have also partnered with oil companies for early-stage support, Bloomberg reports. Occidental Petroleum acquired a direct air capture startup in part so that it could use the captured carbon dioxide for enhanced oil recovery. Meanwhile, oil majors including Chevron and Shell have experimented with using solar to boost their oil output.

Regulatory Uncertainty

Rondo sees applications of its technology beyond the fossil fuel sector, including for the production of green cement, aluminum, and other industrial processes. The company has also partnered with Portugal-based energy company EDP to install 2 GW of heat batteries in Europe.

Rondo Energy is focusing most of its future development efforts outside the US, partly because the current administration has made long term business planning virtually impossible with its frequent policy shifts, O’Donnell maintains. In theory, battery storage technology still qualifies for federal clean energy tax credits even after the One Big Beautiful Bill was passed by Congress in the spring.

But who knows what the pudgy potentate on the Potomac and his sycophants will decide next week? Is a battery that stores heat instead of electricity a “battery?” And if it is today, will it be tomorrow? Business decisions require certainty. When there is none, businesses often take a “wait and see” approach, to the detriment of the economy in general.

Another factor favoring deployment of the Rondo Energy technology in Europe is the change in the Continent’s economy after access to cheap Russian supplies of methane was cut off when Russia invaded Ukraine. Much of the process heat utilized by industries in Europe was supplied by burning methane, but now that the price of that fuel has gone up dramatically, the Rondo Energy technology looks quite appealing from a business point of view, where it might not have a few years ago.

In Europe, Rondo Energy has won a commitment of €75 million from Breakthrough Energy Catalyst, the European Commission, and the European Investment Bank. The funding will support projects at a chemicals plant in Germany, a green industrial park in Denmark, and an unnamed food and beverage processing facility.

Industry Is Waiting

The new projects follow a $60 million investment round last year that included Breakthrough Energy Catalyst and Energy Impact Partners, as well as ​“a whole host of industrial groups wanting to use Rondo for their particular application, from mining and minerals to textiles and cement,” Eric Trusiewicz, CEO of Rondo Energy, told Canary Media.

Other industrial companies interested in the Rondo Energy technology are mining giant Rio Tinto, chemicals manufacturer SABIC, SDCL Energy Efficiency Income Trust, and Siam Cement Group, a major cement manufacturer that also produces the refractory bricks used in the Rondo heat batteries.

The technology itself is well known — refractory brick has been used to store heat in blast furnaces used for making steel for more than a century. The funding Rondo is getting for its European projects will help finance “two to three first of a kind projects in a series of industries,” Trusiewicz said. That’s important because industrial companies want to see successful implementations in facilities similar to their own before committing to costly and time consuming retrofits.

Rondo is not alone in the clean energy for process heat field. My colleague Jake Richardson is reporting on another 100 MWh heat battery being installed by Alliant Energy in Grant County, Wisconsin. Electrified Thermal Solutions, started by a couple of MIT graduates, has tweaked the heating process by electrifying the bricks themselves so they heat themselves directly rather than being heated indirectly by external devices.

Process heat accounts for roughly half of all energy consumed by humans every year. Decarbonizing it is cheap and efficient — and essential to maintaining a sustainable environment where humans can continue to thrive for more than a few more centuries.