這些熾熱的岩石可以發出比太陽更亮的光。 它們還可以幫助淘汰化石燃料 (1/2)

Recently CNN.co.jp reported the following:

These hot rocks can glow brighter than the sun. They could also help spell the end of fossil fuels (1/2)

Bill Weir, CNN Chief Climate Correspondent

Mon, December 18, 2023 at 7:54 a.m. PST

At some point in the dawn of humanity, a smarter-than-average homo sapien moved a rock away from the fire for warmth and invented the thermal battery.

Over a million years later, as humanity struggles to evolve past fossil fuels in time to avoid climate collapse, that simple idea is making a modern comeback – and hot rocks are hotter than ever, literally and figuratively.

“(The rocks) in the box right now are about 1,600 degrees Celsius,” Andrew Ponec said, standing next to a thermal battery the size of a small building. That is nearly 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, “Hotter than the melting point of steel,” he explained.

But what makes his box of white-hot rocks so significant is they were not heated by burning tons of coal or gas, but by catching sunlight with the thousands of photovoltaic solar panels that surround his prototype west of Fresno.

If successful, Ponec and his start-up Antora Energy could be part of a new, multi-trillion-dollar energy storage sector that simply uses sun or wind to make boxes of rocks hot enough to run the world’s biggest factories.

“People sometimes feel like they’re insulting us by saying, ‘Hey, that sounds really simple,” Ponec laughed. “And we say, ‘No, that’s exactly the point.’”

Ponec’s clean energy passions began when he was a curious public-school kid tinkering with photovoltaics in his parent’s garage and was lured to drop out of Stanford to build grid-scale solar plants.

When he went back to get his degree, he realized while sun and wind is great for topping off the batteries in cars and homes, there is an even more urgent demand to clean up the fuel sources of industrial heat needed to make everything from baby food to steel. And because a factory’s energy demand is often 24/7, heavy industry has yet to take advantage of the plunging price of renewables.

“Most days in the middle of the day in California, electricity on the wholesale market is free and sometimes even negative dollars, because there’s so much solar that’s now been installed,” Ponec said, “and we’re seeing the same thing in other states with wind. The problem is you can’t shut down your factory when the sun goes behind a cloud or the wind stops blowing, and that’s exactly the problem that we focused on.”

While the word “battery” most likely evokes the chemical kind found in cars and electronics in 2023, hot rocks currently store ten times as much energy as lithium ion around the world, thanks to an invention from the 1800s known as Cowper stoves. Often found in smelting plants, these massive towers of stacked bricks absorb the wasted heat of a blast furnace until it heats to nearly 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and then provides over 100 megawatts of heat energy for about 20 minutes.

The process can be repeated 24 times a day for 30 years, and Antora is among the startups experimenting with different kinds of rocks in insulated boxes or molten salt in cylinders to find the most efficient combination.

“We were pretty intrigued by graphite for a number of reasons,” Ponec said. The cheap and abundant carbon found in pencils – which is also used to smelt aluminum and steel – can hold so much heat, it glows hotter than the sun, he said.

“The key thing that those furnaces didn’t have is a way to get the heat back out,” he said. “We’ve added some cavities, some gaps in the carbon that allow light from deep within the system to shine out and some insulated doors that can open and close that allow that light to shine out when you want it. In the future, we’ll be using that light not just to create steam, but to create much higher temperature heat for industries like cement and steel.”

(to be continued)

Translation

在人類誕生之初的某個時刻，一個比普通人更聰明的智人將一塊石頭從火上移開取暖，並發明了熱能的儲存。

超過一百萬年後，當人類努力及時擺脫化石燃料以避免氣候崩潰時，這個簡單的想法正在現代捲土重來 - 無論從字面上還是比喻上來說，熱岩石都比以往任何時候都更熱。

「（岩石）盒子裡的現在溫度約為 1,600 攝氏度，」Andrew Ponec 站在一個小型建築般大小的儲熱池旁邊說道。 那溫度接近華氏 3,000 度，他解釋道: 「比鋼的熔點還要熱」。

但他的白熱岩石盒子之所以如此重要，是因為它們並不是通過燃燒大量的煤炭或天然氣來加熱的，而是通過位於 Fresno 以西, 圍繞他的這個原型體的數千個光伏太陽能電池板捕捉陽光來加熱。

如果成功，Ponec 和他的新創公司 Antora 能源公司可能會成為價值數萬億美元的新能源儲存產業的一部分，該產業只需利用太陽能或風能來製造足夠熱的岩石箱去運行世界上最大的工廠。

Ponec 笑著說: 「人們有時會覺得, 當他們說 :『嘿，這聽起來很簡單』 是在侮辱我們」。 「我們說: 『不，這正是重點』」。

Ponec 對清潔能源的熱情始於他還是個好奇的公立學校孩子時，他在父母的車庫裡收理改動光能發電物件器，並被誘惑從史丹佛大學退學去建造電網規模的太陽能發電廠。

當他回去獲得學位時，他意識到，雖然陽光和風非常適合補充汽車和家庭的電池，但更迫切的需求是使令生產嬰兒食品到鋼鐵等各種產品所需的工業熱能燃料源变得清潔。 由於工廠的能源需求通常是 24/7，重工業尚在等待再生能源價格暴跌的機會來臨。

Ponec 說：「在加州中午的大部分時間裡，電力在批發市場上都是免費的，有時甚至是負美元，因為現在安裝了太多的太陽能，我們在其他有風的州也看到了同樣的情況。 問題是，當太陽落入雲層或風停止時，你無法停頓工廠，而這正是我們關注的問題」。

雖然「電池」這個詞很可能讓人想起2023 年汽車和電子產品中發現的化學物質，但因為於1800 年代發明的「考珀爐」，令目前全球熱岩石儲存的能量是鋰離子的十倍。 這些巨大的磚塔經常出現在冶煉廠中，它們吸收高爐的廢熱，直到加熱到近 3,000 華氏度，然後在大約 20 分鐘內提供超過 100 兆瓦的熱能。

這個過程可以每天重複 24 次並持續 30 年，Antora 是眾多新創公司之一，他們在隔熱盒中試驗不同種類的岩石，或在圓筒中試驗熔鹽，以找到最有效的組合。

Ponec 說: 「出於多種原因，我們對石墨非常感興趣」。 鉛筆中含有的碳是廉價且豐富，也可用於冶煉鋁和鋼，可以容納如此多的熱量，發出的光比太陽還要熱。

他說: 「關鍵是這些熔爐沒有的沒有辦法將熱量散發出去」; 「我們在碳上添加了一些空位和一些間隙，讓光線從系統深處射出，還添加了一些可以打開和關閉的隔熱門，讓光線在需要時射出。 未來，我們不僅會利用這種光來產生蒸汽，還會為水泥和鋼鐵等行業產生更高溫度的熱量」。

（待續）

Note:

Cowper stove is a kind of regenerative heat exchanger. A regenerative heat exchanger, or more commonly a regenerator, is a type of heat exchanger where heat from the hot fluid is intermittently stored in a thermal storage medium before it is transferred to the cold fluid. Regenerative heating was one of the most important technologies developed during the Industrial Revolution when it was used in the hot blast process on blast furnaces. It was later used in glass melting furnaces and steel making. The first regenerator was invented by Rev. Robert Stirling in 1816. Edward Alfred Cowper applied the regeneration principle to blast furnaces, in the form of the "Cowper stove", patented in 1857. This is almost invariably used with blast furnaces to this day. (Wikipedia)