Building Blocks for Energy Storage: MGA Thermal tour

Dang! Rosie hitting them woth the real questions! Lifecycle analysis, recycling, efficiency, scalability, material sourcing, industrial level interest, how they are doing their cost calculations, small scale vs large scale costs, love it! Keep it up!

I was pleased to see the issue of low efficiency when used to replace a boiler in a conventional power station was addressed. As the CTO said, depending on the price of power, the low round-trip efficiency may still make sense. A good video.

Oh this is amazing!!! Lots of houses use significant portion of their energy for heating, so even without conversion back to electricity, this would make a lot of sense. Great to see a scalable technology, too. More power to them :)

Great work as always! After speaking with a somewhat similar company (Rondo Energy) it opened my eyes to the world of industrial heating needs. I asked them at the time about phase change materials (PCM), due to the high specific heat capacity available, but they said it was less suited to their applications due to the higher temperatures they operate at (1000K +). Really interesting to see a company combining the advantages of bricks and PCMs! I am interested to see what portion of MGA's use cases will be for electrical vs thermal power output - Rondo were very focused on thermal output (mainly for cement), but I guess if the renewable power is really surplus to requirement this cheap 30% storage efficiency can make sense. It just strikes me that we are better off trying to load shift applications where possible, but I always welcome as many solutions to a problem as possible at the end of the day! The direct use of heat is also just very satisfying due to the cheap 95%+ round trip efficiencies it offers!

I think it's important to emphasize the electricity to heat cycle rather than electricity to electricity round trip. Vast quantities of gas and coal are used for industrial heating. It's not necessary to convert it back to electricity for this to reduce carbon emissions and enable the switch to intermittent renewables. For this task it is far, far superior to battery electric storage. If it also manages to be competitive for the round trip, that is a bonus, but not at all necessary for this to succeed.

Thanks for this. I'm very happy with his list of efficiency losses, allowing a direct comparison to other storage technologies. I'm always interested in passive solar because of how much more efficient it is than active solar. This is a good passive solar battery.

Here in the UK we have had night storage heaters for many decades. They are concrete blocks mounted on the wall in each room. They heat with restive electricity during the night using the excess grid power. They are generally not great as the heat given off doesn't last all day. If all the blocks were stored underground surrounded by very good insulation and water pipes transferring the heat from the bricks to radiators in each room it would work much better. Combined with roof solar then block could recharge some during peek sunlight and then again at cheap night rate. If the heat.is not needed.during the day the bricks will retain more heat as they will be in one large unit with better I solutions. So for the times after work/evening there is a good chance you'll have enough heat, say 5pm to 10pm.

These types of heat batteries would be fantastic here in Quebec. Electricity to heat is what we need!

Thanks Rosie, this is an excellent and thought provoking report. For home scale, I can see that the applicability is very limited if thermal storage is used since storage hot water services already provide this and home heating is required for a fraction of the year. For industrial scale, its very much a different proposition though. The example of using disused coal fired power plant is brilliant as it allows the continued use of infrastructure within the power plant and electricity distribution infrastructure already in place! Go MGA!!

Interesting that safety is first in the list of priorities - but graphite can burn at 400C and is used to heat Aluminium to 700C. If there is a leak of steam and oxygen (air) enters, it will burn like a BBQ.

Welcome back and congratulations, fascinating development, II wish it all sucess. It could be a gamechanger for large building, district heating and industrial use where heat is used directly. Must make more sense than hydrogen.

Thank you Rosie. This is another example of smart people coming up with a solid addition to the matrix of solutions that we are certain to require to achieve our effectiveness goals.

I was reading up on Graphite Blocks for Heat Storage / Graphite Powder as a Heat Transfer Fluid, but this is even cooler!, almost like “vapor chambers” but *molten metal*. !

Thank you for bringing this to us Rosemary.

For places that are cold, storing heat cheaply can already be quite a tempting option.

Great, thorough video. I think the comparisons with other storage tech is very helpful and important. Thanks!

This is very similar to the bricks being used in night storage heatings about 50 years ago. The idea was to heat them up with cheap electricity at night and they released the heat at day. If you live in Germany you can get this "new hot technology" for free, when people modernize their heatings and throw them in the trash 😁 That's where I got some of these bricks to put them on my wood stove as heat storage. Worked fine, but I replaced them with iron blocks later. P.S. You can also get complete radiators for free, with the bricks, electrical heating already integrated, etc., look for used "Nachtspeicherofen"

This is a great idea. Cheap, readily available materials 250Kwh storage per m3 sounds amazing

This tech in homes that require mainly heating would be great. We live in Tassie and use most of our energy for heating. Would definitely be an efficient way to load shift heating requirements.

One more thing. Thank you Mr Alex Post; you have finallly said in public, what I have been screaming(!!!) at all my favourite YouTubers for years- Round-Trip Efficiency doesn't matter. Not a bit. (All the other stuff, 'What he said'.)