“Industries like alumina are challenging to decarbonize because alumina refineries require huge quantities of heat 24/7, often at high temperatures.” Jeremy Keller, SVP of Business Development at Rondo Energy

Jeremy brings to Rondo Energy a high level of expertise in taking energy projects from ideation through deployment, including evaluation of facility energy data, financial modelling and technical scope development. Before joining Rondo, Jeremy spent ten years with the leading renewable energy and energy efficiency company Ameresco, where he developed and delivered hundreds of projects for commercial and industrial businesses. He is a licensed mechanical engineer in the State of Washington with expertise in the design and technical applications of energy storage, solar photovoltaics, microgrids, renewable natural gas and HVAC systems. Jeremy earned an MBA from Oregon State University and bachelor’s degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Physics from the University of Washington.

AlCircle: Please share the innovative journey of Rondo Heat Battery (RHB). How is it providing the world’s lowest-cost, zero-carbon industrial heat?

Jeremy Keller: Rondo Energy provides zero-carbon, low-cost industrial heat to heavy industries like alumina, mining, minerals, chemicals, and food and beverage production. It does this by capturing low-cost renewable electricity in the Rondo Heat Battery (RHB), which provides on-demand delivery of high-temperature heat in the form of hot air, steam or hot water. Rondo helps customers lower operating costs while continuously powering operations with zero-carbon energy.

We use common materials and methods that have been proven for industrial use for centuries – that’s the point. For example, the steel industry uses a 200-year-old technology called brick blast stoves for heat storage -- Rondo is leveraging a similar material for our bricks. These blast stoves are typically heated to about 1400 degrees Celsius, then cooled back down on about a one-hour cycle. They can last for 50+ years.

We combined this proven brick material with electric resistive heaters powered by intermittent renewable sources to deliver heat to customers at 98% efficiency. The RHB is built with materials that are intrinsically proven and bankable so that we can scale rapidly. This technology is possible today because of super computational fluid dynamics, finite element analysis and AI system controls.

AlCircle: What will be the impact following the commercial availability of the revolutionary Rondo Heat Battery (RHB), the RHB100 and the RHB300 to the heavy industries? Which specific industry is it targeting?

Jeremy Keller: A staggering 74% of industrial greenhouse gas emissions are tied to heat – with energy-intensive processes requiring temperatures up to thousands of degrees. Stepping back and looking at a global scale, these processes account for ~23% of global carbon-dioxide emissions.

Industries like alumina are challenging to decarbonize because alumina refineries require huge quantities of heat 24/7, often at high temperatures. Decarbonizing industrial heat will require 5x more renewables than are currently deployed in the world today, with ~9000GW of new renewables needed.

Our mission is to substantially lower global CO2 emissions by unlocking decarbonization for sectors that use industrial heat or steam, like alumina, cement, steel, mining/minerals, food & beverage, district heating, chemicals, low-carbon fuels etc. We see a pathway for reducing global emissions by up to 15% in the next 15 years -- within these sectors alone.

Rondo Heat Batteries charge and discharge simultaneously and are dynamically insulated to minimize environmental losses. The bricks create an echo chamber to superheat air that passes through them. That air is sent to the customer or used in a standard boiler package to generate steam before being cycled around the system in a layer of insulation and pre-warmed by any heat that leaks through. This whole process then begins again. This dynamic insulation maximizes our efficiency, with round-trip electricity in-to-heat-out efficiency sitting at around 98%. Our typical use case involves taking an intermittent daily electrical generation, such as a solar PV array or wind farm, and dispatching it evenly over a rolling 24-hour period. This is particularly valuable for industrial heat applications looking to decarbonize their heat loads while maintaining consistent process conditions.

AlCircle: How can Rondo Heat Batteries be a game changer to the aluminium industry?

Jeremy Keller: The Rondo Heat Battery can deliver steam and hot air at the same pressure and temperature required by existing processes, delivering a pathway for 100 per cent decarbonization of alumina processing with significantly lower operating costs. It also requires less grid updates than electric boilers and limited capital costs, all while at the scale needed for the alumina industry.

AlCircle: How is Rondo Heat Battery supporting the ESG and net-zero missions?

Jeremy Keller: By leveraging already proven wind and solar, its method of generating fossil fuel-free heat is more scalable than many emerging carbon reduction technologies. Rondo’s customer facilities are showing 50 per cent to 90 per cent reductions in emissions and reductions in operating costs of 30 per cent or more.

A single RHB300 eliminates more than 40,000 tonnes of CO2 per year-- more than is eliminated by 8,700 electric vehicles. Replacing just the industrial heat used today in California with RHB zero-carbon heat would eliminate five times more CO2 than all of the EVs on the road in the US today (13.6M EVs).

AlCircle: Could you detail more about Rondo’s patented “brick toaster”?

Jeremy Keller: As discussed above, the Rondo Heat Battery (RHB) captures intermittent wind and solar electricity and then stores the energy from that electricity as high-temperature heat in brick materials. Its patented “brick toaster” rapidly and uniformly heats these brick materials to deliver continuous, constant temperature heat 24 hours a day.

We designed our systems using low-cost, least-risk components built to last more than 30 years. The battery uses heat storage, and transfer processes that rely on materials the metals, ceramics, and chemical industries have used for a century.