Will a “stone” that shines brighter than the sun herald the end of the fossil fuel era?
2024.01.02 Tue posted at 17:30 JST
FRESNO, Calif. (CNN) At the dawn of humanity, smarter-than-average Homo sapiens invented the thermal battery by keeping rocks away from fires to keep warm.
More than a million years later, that simple idea is coming back to life as humans struggle to outgrow fossil fuels to avert the climate crisis. Literally and figuratively, heat storage in rocks is hotter than ever.
“It’s 1,600 degrees inside the box right now,” said Andrew Ponek, standing next to a thermal battery the size of a small building. The temperature is said to be higher than the melting point of iron.
What makes Ponek’s incandescent stone boxes so important is that they were not heated by burning large amounts of coal or gas; they were heated by thousands of solar-powered solar panels surrounding Ponek’s prototype. The point is that it was heated by receiving it.
CNN climate reporter walking through a solar farm in Antola/Julian Quinones/CNN
If successful, Ponek and his startup Antra Energy could become part of a new multitrillion-dollar energy storage space. There, the sun and wind are used to heat stone boxes to temperatures high enough to run one of the world’s largest factories.
Ponek’s passion for clean energy began as a curious public school student tinkering with solar power in his garage. Ponek dropped out of Stanford University to build a large-scale solar power plant.
When Ponek went back to school to get his degree, he realized that while solar and wind power are good for charging batteries in cars and homes, they are the fuel for industrial heat sources needed to make everything from baby food to steel. I realized that cleaning up the area was a more urgent task. Also, because the energy needs of factories are often 24/7, heavy industry has not yet benefited from falling prices of renewable energy.
“Most days in California, wholesale market power prices are zero, and sometimes even negative, because there is so much solar power installed right now. Even in other states with wind. Similar things are happening. The problem is that factories can’t shut down when the sun goes behind the clouds or the wind stops blowing. That’s exactly what we focused on.” Mr. Miss)
Energy storage device of the future? , a prototype of a “thermal battery”
The word “battery” often brings to mind the chemicals used in cars and electronic devices. Heat-storing rocks can now store 10 times more energy than lithium-ion batteries, thanks to an invention known as the Cowper stove from the 1800s. A huge tower made of stacked bricks, often seen in smelters, absorbs the waste heat from the blast furnace and heats it to nearly 3,000 degrees. Over 100 megawatts of thermal energy is then delivered for about 20 minutes.
This process can be repeated 24 times a day for 30 years. Antra is experimenting with different types of rock and combinations of molten salt in cylinders inside an insulated box to find the most efficient combination.
“I became interested in graphite for a variety of reasons,” Ponek said. The cheap and abundant carbon in pencils can hold so much heat that they shine hotter than the sun, Ponek said.
Mr. Ponek holds Antra’s carbon block.
Antra has raised $80 million in seed capital from investors including entrepreneur Bill Gates. But its main competitor is Rondo, a startup also headquartered in California’s Bay Area. Rondo uses a lot of refractory bricks, which are cheaper by weight than carbon but don’t have as much energy density. Rondo has raised more funding than Antra, and its first battery is producing commercial power at an ethanol plant in California.
In an interview with CNN, Rondo CEO John O’Donnell explained, “We have developed an innovative method that allows us to directly heat bricks using invisible light, or infrared rays, from a heating element.” A third-party report revealed that the material can last for 100 years.
“Both companies are doing heat and power storage,” said Jesse Jenkins, a professor of engineering at Princeton University. “It’s a storage technology.”
Jenkins, who is also a Rondo consultant, said using stones has a clear advantage over chemical batteries, which can store electricity but not heat.
The CEOs of Antra and Rondo attended the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP28) in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE). Both Ponek and O’Donnell returned home excited by the interest in their ideas and the various groundbreaking breakthroughs in clean energy.
“If you had asked me five or 10 years ago, I would have said, ‘I don’t know if we have everything we need to decarbonize.’ But today, we have the tools we need. We just have to deploy it. The transition is inevitable. It’s going to happen. If you talk to people in the fossil fuel industry behind closed doors, many will tell you the same thing.” Mr. Ponek)
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2024-01-02 08:30:00
