It was an absolute pleasure speaking with you! Thank you for telling the story of industrial decarbonization via electric thermal energy storage.

This is the first I have heard of Rondo Energy, so thank you for the introduction. However, I would like to hear more technical details about their heat storage battery. Pros: 1) off the shelf technologies 2) simple, long life materials 3) high output temperatures (compared to other heat storage technologies). I love this part of the solution. Cons: 1) I am *very* skeptical of the stated 98% storage efficiency mentioned at the start of the video. Usually, when talking about storage technology, people quote the "round trip efficiency", meaning, what percent of the input energy comes out durring discharge as *usable* energy. However, I suspect you are quoting the *charging* efficiency, meaning how much of the input energy is stored in the battery, ignoring how much energy is lost durring the extraction process. If you really do mean "round trip efficiency", then this statistic is so outlandish, it really is "too good to be true", and begs for justification and a heavy dose of skepticism. This would be astounding, and much higher than any of the other heat storage technologies. Lithium ion itself is typically stated to have 90% round trip storage effeciency, which is higher than any other heat energy storage technology that I am aware of. 2) There is no explanation of how the heat (ie, hot air?) used after it leaves the battery. I can imagine a few uses, but some solid real world examples would have been nice. 3) There is no talk about the ideal storage charge/discharge cycle time. Is this technology better suited to be used for short term (4 hour) medium term (8 to 12 hour) or long term (days/weeks) storage?

8 minute video and I still haven't heard why heating bricks is suddenly revolutionary

Did I miss the part where the losses were discussed over that 12 hour period? What percentage of the stored heat is still available at the end of a 12 hour wait?

So it only works by also constantly extracting 120°C from it... which apparently is calculated as 100% efficient itself. And a storage duration of 12 hours means that it can only respond to very short term fluctuations, i.e. mostly day/night cycle. It might be a neat piece of technology that can be useful in quite a few places, but it's by no means the killer grid storage solution that makes other batteries obsolete. Most serious attempts at long term grid storage run below 70% efficiency because that's just the cost of affordable long term storage.

We need the electric-electric efficiency to compare to batteries there is no way that going to be 98%. This is electric to heat efficiency, the question is can you capture all that heat? And using air, isn't it going to create alot of NOx pollution?

I have a friend working on iron flow batteries which have the promise of being extremely cheap. Good to see people pointing out the ridiculousness of using lithium for grid scale installations.

Underated channel. Love the content, keep it coming champ!

Interesting, the use of simple materials to efficiently store bulk heat. Also, pairing this with the amazing TPV (solid-state heat-to-current) tech from MIT could be a winner.

So impressive, your video quality has skyrocketed. 55k subs. Astounding mate. Keep it up, I use your vids in my engineering circles.

I have to say for all the people who have covered the topic you are the only one who actually went into the details of it & how it actually works & what is its USP

Rondo has what plants crave

This is what we should be thinking about. Clean energy storage is the question of this era.

Nice, glad we are innovating. Goodjob Rondo!

Rondo. It’s got what plants need.

That's pretty awesome :-D Battery storage is literally the most limiting factor right now, in freeing humanity from mundane tasks....

This is a thermal mass storage system, albeit a high temperature one. Such high temperatures are expensive to build and maintain, and inefficient as hell. There just isn't enough mass that can be positioned close enough to the intended use.

This feels like a Tom Scott video, good quality bro

Kudos to you. Industrial processes are the largest segment of FF use. And the waste heat is very usable.

So they took a Russian stove, increased in size alittle and replaced the heat source from combustible materials to electricity.

Okay, so why does the weight of this thing matter so much, it's a static facility.

Rondo has what heat needs, Electrolytes

Now THIS is accessible to MANY.

This was my Concept for a House in aprox 2010, I Envisioned a Large Cubic Sand Battery to last through winter, done some Calculations Too!

This actually makes a lot of sense, as it's basically how storage heaters work.

! have heard this 100 times before. “This is gonna be the next latest and greatest thing to solve all of our energy needs” and it turns out to be snaggle. I need proof. I want to see a proof of concept prototype working in operation and I want to be able to inspect it with my own engineers.

Good thing there are low temp boiling points. Excellent work Rondo!

Finally actually sustainable green tech.

"20% of the cost" is sensible. "5 times cheaper", as the headline said, is gibberish. Once you are one times cheaper it's free. 5 times cheaper means that you are giving the customer 4 times the previous price along with the goods.

It's not storage of electricity, but storage of heat. You'd still need a turbine and generator (50% efficiency at best) to convert it back to electricity. It's very rare to transferring energy as heat.

Another fabulous video. Thank you!

High temp storage for industry, yes, but it won't be used for low temps like district heating. However you store the heat, you need to minimize entropy generation - so you'd use a heat pump as opposed to ohmic heating. For districts, the key is scale for long duration - rocks and water underground with no insulation, and locality for diurnal storage - dynamically responding to distribution bottlenecks in the heat network and short term intermittency in the grid, with insulated water tanks.

This sounds like such a promising technology!! And amazing video as always

This is amazing. Well explained.

Brilliant ! Great video! Thanks 🙏 ❤

Very well presented. Do be careful to keep your case-sensitive units correct. Kilowatt-hours per kilogramme is kWh/kg not KWH/KG, which would be Kelvin-Watt-Henry per Kelvin-Giga....

Thanks for this summary of Rondo's thermal-battery storage approach. With the double-stack approach, are you cutting your energy density in half, compared to Li-ion's ~260 wh/kg? It would be helpful to have a cost comparison between the Rondo system and Lithium, where Li-ion can be installed at say $100/kW and LiFePh can be installed at say $75/kW, with comparable lifetimes to Rondo, optimized by thermal management and controlling depth of discharge? For lower-temperature applications, like the district heating mentioned in your summary, the more detailed cost comparison should also include the use of heat-pumps with a high Coefficient of Performance of at least 5.

Top video, great topic and very well done!

Just a quick comment after reading through the comments... This particular focus is industrial. This about taking cleanly produced electricity and converting it to heat and storing that heat. The heat is the desired 'product', for industrial processes. The high efficiency is due to not converting this heat to anything else. Industry currently using fossil fuel to create the heat, such as gas fired boilers for water and steam. This is a brilliant strategy, as industry are huge energy consumers. This is not for home use. Solutions for homes will come in other forms. To be clear, I no nothing of Rondo, or Mr O'Donnell, or the whole process, other than what I have seen here in this video. It seems many were not getting it, based on the comments. - Cheers

How do they insulate the heating chamber so well? I can't see how you can store such high heats without losing a lot of it to the environment.

In Finland it is customary to use three layered windows. The caps are filled with argon gas.

Thank you Finland.

Novel and innovative idea, something to look out for in the near future!

Very pretty but just more vaporware. Be interested to see if they even exist in a year.

A storage system with a 98% efficiency with a fan and thermal energy as Core Elements… sure… I wonder why has no one has ever thought about it before?!

Thank you. Great video.

Great video, waiting for more

Wow, awesome content!

Interesting video which might have further applications. I don't think (m)any systems have used radiative energy to smooth uneven heating problems.

This is a case where most people don't understand the economy of scale in industry. A industrial site doesn't use 100 times as much energy as a home, it uses 100,000 times as much. One of these storage systems the size of a large barn could replace a boiler and run on renewable energy. That is a pretty big deal. There are nearly a million industrial scale boilers in the world, and replacing them with something like this could buffer the renewable grid way better than 100 million F150s ever could.

Nice content !!! Had me remember that Thomas Jefferson used bricks to store passive solar heat at his Monticello home!

Excellent video.

When you say "energy density equal to lithium ion batteries", you should specify if you mean energy density by *weight*, or energy density by *volume*.

I would be extremely interested to see how well this scales down for the use of heat in smallscale industry. Ceramics and metalworking, the potential applications are significant.

Well done. To bring attention to a little game....rondo is rondo

Great video. How does this system compares to the thermal storage system by means of molten salts tanks that usually are installed in CSP generation plants?

This is the kind of ingenuity needed for solving energy storage! Great video, and thanks for sharing!

Still no idea how you prevent heat just leaking away... But this sounds like a great investment, just like Theranos.

I live off grid with solar and batteries, it cost very little, the energy savings in SA where grid power is 42c per kWh will pay for my system in a few years. Hot bricks might help at certain scales, but the cheap tech to be off grid is here already if you know how to use less power. I never need to ration power, but use an efficient setup.

I'm a bit sceptical on the high efficiency and duration claimed. Temperature is conducted in three ways: Direct conduction (on contact), convection, and radiation. Direct conduction can be avoided best by "air-gapping" the materials, or even better by "vacuum-gapping" like in Dewar vessels. Convection can be avoided by vacuum, too, or by materials that would significantly restrict the ability of the surrounding gas to move (like in styrofoam or glass wool). However, at these temperatures, a major part of the heat is already transferred by radiation, i.e., infrared and visible light. And a good part of the emission is already in the red and yellow visible light. To accommodate for that, and for longevity, the inner walls of the insulator would have to be plated with gold, as other feasible metals (e.g. silver, as also used for Dewar vessels, or aluminium) would degrade too quickly under these harsh conditions. But the walls can't be made out of normal glass, because it would already get soft at temperatures > 1000°C. So a special glass, or even more expensive materials (like quartz or ceramics) would be needed. That significantly contributes to the cost, especially when considering the enormous areas that needed to be covered for a feasible storage of heat. And probably a single layer of insulation would not suffice. Besides that, the material is under enormous mechanical stress. Microscopic cracks would be the consequence, and thus, either frequent maintenance or heat loss. I don't say this can't work, I'm just a bit sceptical on the claimed numbers for efficiency and use cycles.

Should be tested quickly in a small project to see real world benefit !

Thanks for the video. Another piece of the puzzle

Reminds me of the much older Liquid Metal Batteries that AMBRI is currently working on for grid level storage.

Interesting and great content keep it up

Very awesome I would love to see you cover about the uses of Graphene that could be used in radiators for both on earth and space because of it being about 10 times more better than water cooling and 25 times less energy I believe tho I can't remember fullu but I do study a ton of science and stuff from new atlas, business insider, undecided with mat farewell, and more tho I would like you to cover from what I said of graphene that could be used for both on earth and space including maybe other small things and stuff like electronics and things. Thanks for the video, the quality is great, wish your channel was larger in terms of subscribers you deserve it!

"where heating is required" Storing heat is not the same as storing electricity. You cannot move heat instantly to point of use, turn a heat pump or charge an EV. Moving heat at 1000-1500C for smelting, ciment is extremely hard, how do you pump heat, what are the pipes, most materials break down at these temperatures. etc. Still a good way to use excess solar energy that is going to become more and more common. (unless EV batteries can use it)

But the picture shows steel ingots in a soaking pit furnace in a forge shop or rolling mill. They have been heated with natural gas or even oil in some places.

How are they going to protect the bricks from crumbling under thermal cycling ?

My first thought is, if this idea is good and cheap with little or no drawbacks, we'd already be using it everywhere.

Wow so cool! Can't wait to never see it used!

Am I the only one that when seeing these types of videos to get a smile on my face ? It later comes with thoughts a d doubts on how are they are going to achieve a much cheaper and efficient way to power something but also if they exist at all and they are not just a fake company trying to just milk money from investors and whatsoever. I hope they achieve their goal.

Another concept that will come and go just like the rest

sounds just like hot air

How well has the super heated salt worked out for solar? Sometimes things remain mostly as an idea because the reality isn't as smooth as the creators imagined

So this is not a ‘battery’ in the conmon sense, but a Power-to-heat solution that can store heat for 1 day and delivers heat in form of steam, Super hot air etc to industries or other heat demanding users.

You mentioned electric heating which is as far as I know almost 100% efficient in turning the electricity into heat but what about heat pumps? I'd assume they wouldn't be capable of reaching temperatures that high but I have no idea honestly.

Rhondo, you may be to late... there is a system that DOES NOT require the Rankin Cycle. At what scale Mw/BTU have you generated at? I do like your concept, best of luck and Godspeed.

Tuned solutions for specific needs.

¡Gracias!

I can appreciate the benefits of storing energy cheaply as heat. However, I wonder if there is a trend that will limit the scope. I notice that the 'Off-Peak' electricity prices are going up faster than the 'Peak' prices. Will the coming demand for power for EV recharging, cause an increase in this trend so there will be little difference between peak and off-peak prices?

Sounds great. Seems well thought out, leveraging in every area.

Storing energy has always been the biggest problem. The reason we drive gasoline powered cars is because gasoline has the best energy to wait ratio of the time. The gas tank is the storage device.

Wow, if this is fully reliable, I sure hope they make it, and we can reduce the use of lithium to more interesting and less polluting applications.

OR, we could use nuclear power and avoid ALL the issues that solar/wind & batteries cause…

Question: do you think a heat battery could be used to store heat from roads and then returned to the road to prevent ice forming, thus increasing the life span of the road and stopping the need to salt roads (the salt badly affects the nearby flora and fish)? If so, which would be better: sand, rondo or another I haven't heard of?

Just like the ancient pyramids were exactly like our old analogue systems where the Antarctica and the desert were used as two opposing fields of cold and heat connected to the centre of earth to send signals through the dimensions of space that’s exactly how this works

Ending battery storage means no batteries in phones, none in EVs... This stuff will replace some battery storage... It cannot fill all applications, not even all industrial heat applications and that is only a small part of all storage that is needed. A lot of electrical storage needs to be able to be used within milliseconds in order to balance the grid. If we need to spin up steam turbines the moment that balancing is needed, the electricity will flow too late for those applications...

This still runs into the same issue as Polar Night. The amount of energy you would need to get it up to temp is massive. To heat a decent sized city of 100K, you'd need something like a megawatt nuclear reactor to provide all the electricity needed for heating the bricks... in which case, why not just use the electricity, which has very little transmission loss, to power electrical radiators? I don't get it... we're trying anything and everything to produce and store power when we should be looking at nuclear which can power everything and doesn't need storage... Nuclear is green. Nuclear is clean. Nuclear lasts a helluva long time. Plus Fission can power Fusion, which will undoubtedly be the power supply of the future.

Amazing tech

Very impressive!

Title should read "...will end up to one third of stationary battery storage"... Far from killing battery storage... I gotta downvote and select "do not recommend channel" for the sensationalistic title... The crazy title trend I have had enough of, and there is no end to the videos that have reasonable titles covering the same subjects so I do not miss out on anything as a result... Yes, I know this interaction still helps the popularity of this video... Just letting you know why the downvote since so many creators seem obsessed with every downvote and I am not trying to cause such distress...

A bearish market unequivocally leave rooms to capitalize and buy stocks at a discount for a better future projection but, the problem most times is that people with little or no knowledge of the stock market try investing by themselves. It once happened to me, then I learned my lesson and contacted a US-based finance consultant by name *TERESA JENSEN WHITE* and everything changed. I started enjoying huge returns from my investment

It helps if there are data for comparison

It's almost like a thermodynamic version of an electric transformer.

Lead would be a far better medium for storing heat, because of its relatively low melting temperature, high density, and the fact that a transition of phase is the best way to get a lot more crammed in, with solid-to-liquid being the best one.

Vaaaporware

great content thanks

The last thing he said at the end of the vid seems the most dubious; fully insulated metropolitan-scale plumbing (for delivering any liquid or gas) would be required, doesn’t exist, and if it did would cost a fortune vs typical facilities

Sensible thermal energy storage is nothing new. This concept is kinda cheap to make and easy to scale in means of pure heat storage. However there are some bottlenecks using an air as the heat transportation medium. 1) Air is very bad in conducting heat, so the heat exchanger between air /steam (or whatever medium) has high requirements for the heat trasfer area and this doesnt scale well, especially if you talk about heat power > 1 MW. 2) Hot air has very low density (>1 kg/m3) so it is no joke to make it move in some higher quantities. 3) using closed air loop meaning that the blower inlet has also higher temperature and there is same problem as in 2. point. I think this concept has a good potential for just pure power to heat applications, but unfortunetally it is not so good for power to heat to power applications.

mmm interesting but im skeptical . The amount of energy needed to initially heat up and to keep the bricks heated may not make the effort worth it. Also up keep. Batteries do wear down over time but there is barely any upkeep, you plunk down a battery, connect it to a computer to monitor the batteries lifespan and leave it. one reason Batteries can save money is because they dont need maintenance as often. This 3000 Degree brick looks like it will need people to constantly keep an eye on it. A 3000 Degree chamber is a fire waiting to happen. This will also still require an motor of some type to convert the steam into electricity which would increase the amount of moving parts that constantly need maintenance and repair. An interesting concept but unless this can turn heat directly into electricity, it will not be replacing batteries for storage.