A super-battery aimed at decarbonizing industry
In this episode, Antora Energy CEO Andrew Ponec talks up his company’s game-changing approach to thermal energy storage.
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Text transcript:
David Roberts
Back in March, I did a podcast on the possibility of using wind and solar electricity to decarbonize industrial heat, which represents fully a quarter of all human final energy consumption. The trick is to transform the variable energy from wind and solar into a steady, predictable stream of heat by using some form of heat battery.
The idea is that heat batteries will charge when renewables are cheap or negatively priced, around midday when all the solar is online, and then use the stored heat to displace natural gas boilers and other fossil fuel heat sources in industrial facilities.
Among other things, this vision represents a huge opportunity for renewable energy developers — industrial heat is effectively a brand new trillion-dollar market for them to play in. And they can often enter that market without waiting in long interconnection queues to connect to the grid.
Anyway, that episode, which I highly encourage you to listen to at some point, was with the CEO of a thermal battery company call Rondo. In it, I mentioned another thermal storage company whose technology caught my eye: Antora Energy.
Like Rondo, Antora is part of the broad “box of rocks” category, but its tech can do some things that, for the time being, no other thermal battery can do.
I don’t want to say much more here — discovery is half the fun — but I will say I’m as geeked about this technology as I have been about anything in ages. I’ve been thinking about it ever since I first heard about it three or four years ago. Now the company has launched its first commercial-scale system! So I’ve brought Antora co-founder and CEO Andrew Ponec on the pod to talk through how it works, what it can do, and how it could transform industrial heat markets.
So with no further ado, Andrew Ponec. Welcome to Volts, thank you so much for coming.
Andrew Ponec
Thank you for having me, David.
David Roberts
This is so fun for me. I've honestly been thinking about this tech for years and really hoping that you guys would make it far enough to justify me doing a pod with you. So I've been rooting for you. So we're going to get to kind of the role heat batteries and heat storage can play in the energy system a little bit later. But I just want to start with the technology itself. So the basic idea here is you're heating up a rock, right. And what you do with the heat, we'll get to that in a second, but let's just start with the rock itself. Tell me about the material you're using for your rocks and their qualities and why you chose that material.
Andrew Ponec
We looked at a lot of different options for the material that we wanted to store energy in, and there are a lot of different types of rocks, types of solid materials that we might choose. And after a pretty thorough search, we decided to focus on carbon, solid carbon. And that was for a number of reasons. We were looking at different attributes that we thought were important, one of which was cost, one of which was earth abundance. We were also looking for things that had existing supply chains and that were extremely stable and safe for long-term operation.
And when we went through all of that process, carbon came out on top as the best option, although I should say that it didn't come out on top the first time around, actually because of a mistake I made in our spreadsheet. Carbon has a really unique property, which is that it gets better at storing energy as it gets hotter. So the specific heat capacity, its ability to store energy, increases by about a factor of three
