Cheap heat-storing 'firebricks' projected to save industries trillions

[Wicked Blue]

By Paul McClure
NewAtlas
August 05, 2024

Transitioning to 100% renewable energy globally would be cheaper and simpler using firebricks, a form of thermal energy storage with roots in the Bronze Age, to produce most of the heat needed for industrial processes, according to a new Stanford study.

Today’s industries require high temperatures for manufacturing, which are achieved largely by continuously burning coal, oil, fossil gas, or biomass. With much of the world focused on reducing emissions by transitioning away from fossil fuels to renewable sources like wind, solar, and hydro, the question is how to provide industries with on-demand continuous heat in a 100% renewable world.

In a recently published study, researchers from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University proposed that an ancient solution, firebricks, could be the answer.

“By storing energy in the form closest to its end use, you reduce inefficiencies in energy conversion,” said Daniel Sambor, a postdoctoral scholar in civil and environmental engineering and a study co-author. “It’s often said in our field that ‘if you want hot showers, store hot water, and if you want cold drink, store ice’; so, this study can be summarized as ‘if you need heat for industry, store it in firebricks.'”

https://newatlas.com/energy/firebricks-industrial-process-heat-clean-energy/

[NNadir]

1. I've heard a lot of excuses for so called "renewable energy's" lack of reliability, and lots of disingenuous schemes...

...to pretend that this lack of reliability can be addressed, but this one is stranger than most.

One of the issues with so called "renewable energy" - and one that reduces its flexibility for use - is that it doesn't provide heat as a primary source, except in Rube Goldberg schemes like the tragic wilderness destruction mess at Ivanpah, which relies on gas to make it less useless.

This is of course, unless one is talking about clear cutting huge stretches of forest to burn them in boilers, something I personally oppose.

Thermal storage has some thermodynamic advantages over destructive junk like batteries and hydrogen, and, as such, the issue is being explored for the Terrapower nuclear plant in Wyoming for which ground breaking is underway For so called "renewable energy," though, it's just more handwaving, wishful thinking and day dreaming of the type that has left our planet in flames, with well over 50 ppm added to the concentrations of the dangerous fossil fuel waste CO₂ in this century while we all made excuses for the grotesque failure of so called "renewable energy" to act as anything but lipstick on the fossil fuel pig.

We need less Rube Goldberg and more of a sense of reality.

[LakeVermilion]

2. I have a friend that uses this technology in his cabin.

He has seventeen bricks in his furnace. The bricks are heated in off-peak hours. A fluid is warmed by passing through the bricks and cycled through tubes in the concrete floor. The heat then rises into the rooms heating objects, not necessarily the air.

Its not a new technology.

[NNadir]

3. That's the point. It's a furnace not a wind turbine.

The functional idiot Amory Lovins was talking about something similar in the last quarter of the 20th century, molten salt tanks in every suburban backyard.

If you poke any "100% renewable energy" fantasy with a dull stick, it crumbles into dust.