👤hochmartinez🕑3y🔼49🗨️68

(Replying to PARENT post)

Summary:

Electricity is used to heat up bricks. Bricks store heat for very long durations. Bricks transfer heat to other systems for industrial heating such as boiling chemicals or steam ironing clothes.

This replaces the fossil fuels used for industrial heat.

👤nashashmi🕑3y🔼0🗨️0

(Replying to PARENT post)

1)The system clearly doesn't exist, or we'd see pictures and video of it. Given how simple such a system is, and that they've received tens of millions in financing, why do they not have even a small scale demonstrator?

2)The video is nothing more than a dressed up zoom "interview" with the CEO and some stock video clips. Everything should be assumed to have been written by, or at least thoroughly vetted by, Rondo.

3)For example, the claim is that lithium ion batteries are expensive at grid scale...but the cost of such batteries continues to fall, there's now commercially viable recycling for them, and other technologies such as iron-flow are cheaper, do not require rare-earth metals, and are already in the commercial marketplace. So is pumped hydro, which they also don't address.

4)The immediate and pretty obvious drawback to their "dynamic insulation" concept: if you stop pumping air through the "battery", the insulation that is rated to only handle 150C is suddenly exposed to thousands of degrees...and now you have a fire, backed by an enormous thermal mass, which is a problem, as firefighting is largely based on using the phase change of water to pull more heat away from a fire than the fire can generate.

5)While this tech sounds nice for industrial processes, it's not anywhere near as practical for domestic heating, where geothermal heat pumps will be more efficient. At its core, this is a system that is fueled by resistive heating, and heat pumps are several times more efficient than resistive heating.

What would be interesting is if they're able to leverage solar radiation directly via solar concentrators. You'd see a roughly four-fold increase in efficiency over solar.

👤KennyBlanken🕑3y🔼0🗨️0

(Replying to PARENT post)

Interesting engineering, but a little sad that the presentation needs to talk down other solutions to make this one seem better.

Demand responsive electrical heat is a solid proven tech, it's only going to expand across industrial sectors via innovations like this. I see no need to talk about perceived lithium battery deficiencies. Bill Gates gets mentioned and he seems a repeat offender in this regard.

👤ZeroGravitas🕑3y🔼0🗨️0

(Replying to PARENT post)

Here's a text-based explanation of what this is:

https://rondo.com/how-it-works

👤perihelions🕑3y🔼0🗨️0

(Replying to PARENT post)

One point in the video talks about that this is novel/interesting because it can handle much higher heat then other thermal storage systems. But at the end of the video it talks about the output being only a bit above 150 degrees. Isn't that completely contradictory? If I want to use this in a steel forge this isn't even remotely close enough.
👤rowanG077🕑3y🔼0🗨️0

(Replying to PARENT post)

When heating is required, they make much more sense than lithium-ion batteries as they are cheaper, use no critical materials, last longer, and are just as efficient!

What method are they using to extract energy from the bricks that's as efficient as lithium-ion discharging?

👤causi🕑3y🔼0🗨️0

(Replying to PARENT post)

Trying to understand what a “heat echo chamber” is. Maybe the thermal mass is enclosed in a metal box?
👤wwarner🕑3y🔼0🗨️0

(Replying to PARENT post)

Is it economical for anything besides heating?
👤ultra_nick🕑3y🔼0🗨️0

(Replying to PARENT post)

The title is clickbait.
👤DubiousPusher🕑3y🔼0🗨️0

(Replying to PARENT post)

This is nothing new, residential heaters have been using the same principle for ages: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storage_heater
👤senko🕑3y🔼0🗨️0