EGN NEWS DESK
“Industrial warmth accounts for one-quarter of the worldwide power consumption and is a large, $450 billion market,” Juha Lindfors, a companion at Lifeline Ventures, stated on Monday in a assertion. “Decarbonizing industrial warmth presents a large alternative.”
Meskanen, a Finnish entrepreneur, stated she first met her co-founder, Nate Weger, in 2023 by way of a DOE-funded program referred to as Cradle to Commerce, which goals to speed up local weather applied sciences developed in U.S. nationwide laboratories. At the time, Weger was ending his PhD on the University of California at Berkeley and conducting analysis on thermal power storage on the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Meskanen moved to the San Francisco Bay Area late final yr to launch Calectra with Weger, who can be the corporate’s chief expertise officer. Since then, the duo have been growing their thermal storage system at each Berkeley Lab and the Port Labs coworking house in Oakland, the place they hold a high-temperature furnace downstairs and take a look at brick supplies, together with a graphite-and-ceramic composite.
Calectra’s strategy is considerably much like that of Brenmiller Energy, Rondo Energy, and different thermal storage corporations. Electrical currents convey bricks or crushed rocks to red-hot temperatures. Ideally, the programs can use the surplus electrical energy generated by wind and photo voltaic tasks throughout off-peak hours — much like what standard battery programs do — serving to steadiness the grid and scale back electrical energy prices. Later, the bricks switch that warmth to issues like cement kilns or, as in Rondo’s case, whiskey distilleries.
But there’s a key distinction in Calectra’s system. Whereas most different corporations use warmth exchangers or different tools to switch warmth to and from bricks, Calectra goals to make its bricks electrically conductive themselves, which Meskanen stated is extra energy-efficient. Electric currents would go instantly by way of the brick materials to generate warmth, much like how currents move by way of the metallic filaments in incandescent lightbulbs to make warmth and lightweight. Pipes carrying scorching air would then feed into the economic processes.
Calectra is simply simply beginning to put this idea to the take a look at. With the pre-seed and grant funding in hand, Meskanen and Weger are working to develop their staff by hiring a supplies scientist and {hardware} engineers to assist nail down the brick-material mixtures and construct a bigger prototype of the system, in preparation for elevating a spherical of seed funding.
“We’re laser-focused on constructing a answer for high-temperature warmth at low price and 0 carbon,” Meskanen stated. “It’s dangerous, but it surely’s value giving it a shot for the sake of the local weather.”
