Getting rid of fossil fuels is relatively easy for a few matters. Housing? Replace furnaces with warmness pumps. Cars and light vans? Ditch internal combustion for batteries and electric cars. Yet for plenty industries like cement, steelmaking, and greater, it’s tough to replace the heating strength of fossil fuels.
But Dan Stack thinks bricks have a shot.
Stack has been working for a decade to imbue the humble brick with the capacity to transform electricity into warmth and shop it for hours on quit. By changing fire bricks already utilized in glassmaking and other industries, he and his colleagues at Electrified Thermal Solutions, wherein he’s co-founder and CEO, had been able to turn them into electric conductors that can carry a modern-day and transform it into searing warmness genuinely by stacking them atop every other.
The business enterprise currently has an elevator-sized demonstration walking, and it’s the use of statistics from that to prepare for a bigger, business-scale unit.
“We’ve logged hundreds of hours now,” Stack informed TechCrunch. ETS’s bricks have to be capable of offer heat for years due to the fact they’re based totally on existing fire bricks, he stated. “These bricks are used to seeing temperatures north of one,seven hundred Celsius for many years.”
The company is making plans to perform its Joule Hive thermal batteries continuously — “maximum of industry needs heat 24/7/365,” Stack said — but that allows you to be cost aggressive with herbal fuel, its customers will ought to charge the bricks while energy prices are low, like while there may be extra wind or sun power.
“Being able to absorb most of your electricity in a few hours is valuable,” he stated, permitting companies to take benefit of no longer just low prices, but also incentives from grid operators for being bendy about after they use power.
In some areas where renewables are abundant and herbal gas is highly-priced, “we will give a go back on funding for these systems as compared to the natural gasoline that customers are burning nowadays,” he said. “We’re seeing an increasing number of signals that display that we can compete face to face with fossil fuels in greater regions.”
ETS is first focused on industries that need large quantities of heat, but no longer the very hottest temperatures. For now, that includes drying, steam technology, and calcination of cement. In time, Stack stated the corporation need to be able to hit 1,800 stages C, making the bricks possible for other industries like steelmaking. Eventually, heat from the bricks is probably able to help run the mills in herbal fuel electricity flowers, displacing the fossil fuel.
The startup is planning to fee its commercial-scale demonstration inside the middle of 2025, Stack said. To hit that milestone, ETS raised $19 million in what the business enterprise is looking a pre-Series A, the employer exclusively advised TechCrunch. The round included investments from Clean Energy Ventures, Clean Energy Venture Group, EDP Ventures, GVP Climate, Holcim Maqer Ventures, Mass Ventures, Starlight Ventures, TechEnergy Ventures, Tupras Ventures, and Vale Ventures.