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 (2/2)

Recently Yahoo News on-line reported the following:

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

Bill Weir, CNN Chief Climate Correspondent

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

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Antora has managed to raise $80 million in seed money from investors that include Bill Gates, but their main competitor is another Bay Area startup called Rondo that uses abundant refractory brick, which is cheaper than carbon by weight but not as energy dense. Rondo has attracted even more funding than Antora and its first battery is producing commercial power for an ethanol plant in California.

“We had this breakthrough that lets us heat brick directly with infrared, invisible light from heating elements,” Rondo CEO John O’Donnell told CNN. “Right away we knew with third-party engineering reports that this stuff is going to last 100 years.”

Tesla recently predicted a carbon-free world will need an astonishing 240 terawatt-hours of energy storage – more than 340 times the amount of storage built with lithium-ion batteries in 2022. O’Donnell predicts more than half of all that new capacity will come in the form of heat batteries, simply because the raw ingredients are so readily available.

By plugging their factories into as many thermal batteries as they need, manufacturers won’t have to wait in a years-long line for grid connections and upgrades.

Given those financial considerations, the old phrase “dumb as a box of rocks” may have to be revised for this new industrial revolution.

“Exciting technologies are great if you’re a venture capitalist and death if you’re a banker,” O’Donnell said. “And it is the bankers and the infrastructure finance folks that like this whole class of technologies. It’s not particularly sexy, but that’s a really good thing.”

“Both companies do heat and power storage,” said Jesse Jenkins, a professor of engineering at Princeton University. “And I think like hydrogen, which similarly has a flexible role to play, it is this kind of long duration storage technology that I’m most optimistic about.”

Jenkins, who specializes in macro-scale energy systems, is also a consultant for Rondo and says the hot rocks model has a distinct advantage over chemical batteries that can store power, but not heat.

“If you can do both, you can ride the cost curves and scaling advantages in the larger industrial sectors, whereas some of the more pure-play electrochemical battery companies are in a make-or-break moment,” Jenkins told CNN.

Both the Antora and Rondo CEOs attended the COP28 climate summit in Dubai where the power of Middle East petrostates was enough to weaken the global commitment to end fossil fuels. But both men came back enthused by the interest in their ideas and the dozens of other breakthroughs in clean energy.

“If you’d asked me five or 10 years ago, I would have said, I’m not sure we have everything we need to decarbonize,” Ponec said strolling through the solar array that powers his battery while a gas-fired power plant sat quiet and idle nearby. “But today, we have the tools we need. We just need to deploy them. The transition is inevitable. It’s going to happen. And if you talk behind closed doors to most of the people in the fossil fuel industry, they’ll say the same thing.”

Translation

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Antora 已成功從包括 Bill Gates 在內的投資者那裡籌集了8,000 萬美元的種子資金，但他們的主要競爭對手是另一家名為 Rondo 的灣區初創公司，該公司使用豐裕的耐火磚，按重量計算，耐火磚比碳磚便宜，但能量密度不高。 Rondo 比 Antora 吸引了更多的資金，其第一塊蓄能池正在為加州的一家乙醇工廠生產商業電力。

Rondo 執行長 John O’Donnell 告訴 CNN： “我們取得了這一突破，可讓我們可以直接由熱元件發出的紅外線、見不到的光來加熱磚塊”; “我們立即透過第三方工程報告得知，這些東西將持續 100 年。”

Tesla 最近預測，一個無碳世界將需要驚人的 240 太瓦時的能源儲存 - 這是2022 年建成的鋰離子電池儲存容量的 340 倍以上。O’Donnell預測，所有新增容量的一半以上將用於以熱能池的形式出現，僅僅是因為原材料太容易獲得。

透過在工廠安裝所需數量的熱能池，製造商將不必排長隊等待電網連接和升級。

考慮到這些財務上的考慮，「笨得像石頭一樣」這句老話可能需要針對這次新工業革命而進行修正。

O’Donnell 說: 「如果你是創投家，令人興奮的技術是偉大的；如果你是銀行家，是死亡」; 「銀行家和基礎設施金融人士喜歡這類的全套技術。 雖然不是特別引起很多興趣和興奮，但這確實是一件好事」。

普林斯頓大學工程學教授 Jesse Jenkins 說: 「兩家公司都從事熱能和電能儲存業務」; 「我認為，就像氫一樣，它同樣具有靈活的角色，我最看好的就是這種長期存儲技術」。

Jenkins 專門研究宏觀能源系統，也是 Rondo 的顧問，他表示熱岩模型比化學電池有明顯的優勢，化學電池可以儲存電能，但不是熱量。

Jenkins 告訴美國有線電視新聞網： “如果兩樣你都能做到，你就可以在更大的工業領域利用成本曲線和規模優勢，而一些单一業務的電化學電池公司正處於生死存亡的時刻。”

Antora 和 Rondo 的執行長都參加了在杜拜舉行的 COP28 氣候高峰會，中東石油國家的力量足以削弱全球終止化石燃料的承諾。 但兩人回來後都對他們自身的想法和清潔能源領域的其他數十項突破感到興奮。

Ponec 在為電池供電的太陽能電池陣列中漫步, 而在附近的燃氣發電廠靜靜地閑置着, 說道: 「如果你在五年或十年前問我，我會說，我不確定我們是否擁有脫碳所需的一切」; 「但今天，我們擁有了所需的工具。 我們只需要部署它們。 這種轉變是不可避免的。 這將會發生。 如果你與化石燃料行業的大多數人閉門交談，他們也會說同樣的話」。

So, according to experts we have the tools and technology needed to say good-bye to fossil fuel. Definitely, the new technologies are great if you’re a venture capitalist and death if you’re a banker. I look forward to seeing a transition in technology regarding energy storage in factories.