Electrified Thermal Solutions has a plan to help the industry replace natural gas with bricks

Getting off fossil fuels is relatively simple for some things. apartment? Replace furnaces with heat pumps. Cars and light trucks? Stop internal combustion for batteries and electric motors. However, for many industries such as cement, steelmaking, etc., it is difficult to replace the thermal power of fossil fuels.

But Dan Stack thinks brick has a chance.

Stack has been working for ten years imbuing the humble brick with the ability to convert electricity into heat and store it for hours. By replacing firebricks already used in glassmaking and other industries, he and his colleagues Electrified Thermal Solutionswhere he is co-founder and CEO, he was able to turn them into electrical conductors that could conduct current and turn it into heating heat by simply stacking them on top of each other.

The company currently has an elevator-sized demonstration and is using data from it to prepare for a larger, commercial-scale unit.

“We’ve logged thousands of hours now,” Stack told TechCrunch. ETS’ bricks should provide heat for years because they are based on existing fire bricks, he said. “These bricks are used to seeing temperatures north of 1,700 Celsius for decades.”

The company plans to run its Joule Hive thermal batteries continuously — “most of the industry wants 24/7/365 heat,” Stack said — but to be competitive with natural gas, its customers will have to recharge the bricks when electricity is supplied. prices are low, such as when there is excess wind or solar power.

“It’s valuable to absorb most of your energy for a few hours,” he said, allowing companies to take advantage not only of lower prices, but also incentives from grid operators to be flexible when using electricity.

In some regions where renewables are abundant and natural gas is expensive, “we can provide a return on investment for these systems compared to the natural gas customers are burning today,” he said. “We’re seeing more and more signals that we can compete head-to-head with fossil fuels in more areas.”

ETS primarily targets industries that need large amounts of heat, not the hottest temperatures. For now, this includes drying, steaming and calcining cement. Over time, Stack said, the company should be able to reach 1,800 degrees C and make the bricks suitable for other industries, such as steelmaking. Finally, heat from the bricks can help drive turbines in natural gas power plants, displacing gas fuel.

The startup plans to launch a commercial-scale demonstration in mid-2025, Stack said. To hit this milestone, ETS has raised $19 million in what the company calls a pre-Series A round, the company told TechCrunch exclusively. The round included investments from Clean Energy Ventures, Clean Energy Ventures, EDP Ventures, GVP Climate, Holcim Mager Ventures, Mass Ventures, Starlight Ventures, TechEnergy Ventures, Tupras Ventures and Vale Ventures.