Solar has a simple problem for heavy industry. The sun sets, but boilers and process heat demands do not. In Kern County, California, one company’s answer is not an electrical battery. It is a four-story heat battery built around refractory brick, charged by solar power, and used to make steam overnight.
Rondo Energy’s system stores heat, not electricity. Electric heating elements convert solar electricity into heat, which is absorbed by a large brick stack heated past 1,000 C, or 1,832 F. The company has described the interior as a three-dimensional checkerboard of brick and open chambers to help keep temperatures even and charge quickly. When it is time to discharge, air is pushed through the hot brick, and water can be injected to make steam.
Rondo says the brick stack loses less than 1% of stored heat per day. It also reported round-trip efficiency above 97% across the first 10 weeks of verified operation. The system can deliver steam into standard steam flanges at 100-plus bar, or more than 1,450 psi.
The unit operates at a Holmes Western Oil Corp. facility, where steam is used for steam flooding to help produce heavy crude. One gas-fired boiler was replaced with the brick heat battery and a 20-megawatt solar array. Rondo’s cofounder has said the swap avoids about 13,000 metric tons of CO2 per year from that one boiler.
For mason contractors, the takeaway is straightforward. As industrial sites look for ways to replace combustion heat, refractory brick and other high-temperature masonry materials can move from “plant maintenance” work into new-build energy infrastructure.
Read the full, original article from Autonocion.com here.