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Why thermal energy storage is poised for a breakout year.
One of the oldest ways to store up energy is in hot rocks. Egyptians built adobe homes millennia ago that absorbed heat during the day and released it at night, and wood-fired ovens with bricks that radiate residual heat have been around since the Middle Ages.
Now, this ancient form of heating is poised for a breakout year as one of the hottest things in climate tech: thermal batteries. These aren’t the kinds of batteries you’d find in a laptop or electric vehicle. Instead, these stationary, shipping container-sized units can provide the high temperatures necessary to power hard-to-decarbonize industrial processes like smelting or chemical manufacturing. And thanks to the changing economics of clean energy and a generous tax credit in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, investors are increasingly bullish about the technology, helping Silicon Valley startups Antora Energy and Rondo Energy dramatically scale up production with new gigafactories.
The underlying technology is fairly basic. Using essentially the same technology as a toaster, electricity from renewable energy is converted into heat and then stored in thermally conductive rocks or bricks. That heat is then delivered directly as hot air or steam to the industrial facilities that the stationary batteries are sited on. Rondo says it can supply continuous heat at full capacity — that’s over 1,000° Celsius — for 16 to 18 hours, and Antora’s system is rated at 25 hours, helping fill the gaps when sun and wind resources are scarce.
Rondo’s thermal battery at an ethanol plant in California.Courtesy of Rondo Energy.
The climate benefits of this process are clear — and potentially huge. Heat alone comprises half of the world’s total energy consumption, and about 10% of global CO2 emissions come from burning fossil fuels to generate the high temperatures necessary for industrial processes like steel and cement production, chemicals manufacturing, and minerals smelting and refining. These industries are notoriously hard to decarbonize because burning gas or coal has been much cheaper than using electricity to generate high heat.
That’s also why we haven’t traditionally heard a lot about thermal batteries. Before renewables became ubiquitous, the tech just wouldn’t have been very clean or very cheap.
But thanks to the rapidly falling cost of wind and solar, its economics are looking increasingly promising. “There’s this glut of cheap, clean power that is just waiting to be used,” Justin Briggs, Antora’s co-founder and COO, told me. “It’s just going to waste in a lot of cases already.”
John O’Donnell, the co-founder and CEO of Rondo, concurred.“This industrial decarbonization is going to start out absolutely absorbing those negative and zero prices,” he told me. “But it is also going to drive massive new construction of new renewables specifically for its own purpose.”
Of course thermal batteries aren’t the only technology trying to solve industrial heat emissions. Concentrating solar thermal power systems can store the sun’s heat in molten salts, carbon capture and storage systems can pull the emissions from natural gas combustion at the source, and green hydrogen can be combusted for heat delivery.
Indeed, the same forces making thermal energy more attractive are also benefiting green hydrogen in particular. Cheap renewables and lucrative hydrogen subsidies in the IRA mean green hydrogen is also poised to rapidly fall in price. But proponents of thermal batteries argue their technology is much more efficient.
Electrical resistance heating (i.e. turning electricity into heat like a toaster) is already a 100% efficient process. And after storing that heat in rocks for hours or days, you still can get over 90% of it back out. But producing green hydrogen through electrolysis and subsequently combusting it for heat is generally only about 50-66% efficient overall, says Nathan Iyer, a senior associate at the think tank RMI. Although emerging electrolyzer technologies like solid oxide fuel cells can push efficiencies over 80%, in part by recycling waste heat, many green hydrogen production methods could require around 1.5 to two times the amount of renewable electricity as thermal batteries to generate the same amount of heat.
“Pretty much all of the major models are saying thermal batteries are winning when they run all of their optimizations,” Iyer said. “They’re finding a huge chunk of industrial heat is unlocked by these thermal batteries.”
However, when it comes to the most heat-intensive industries, such as steel and cement production, combusting green hydrogen directly where it’s needed could prove much easier than generating and transporting the heat from thermal batteries. As Iyer told me, “At a certain level of heat, the materials that can actually handle the heat and move the heat around the facility are very, very rare.”
Iyer says these challenges begin around 600° or 700° Celsius. But the lion’s share of industrial processes take place below this temperature range, for use cases that thermal batteries appear well-equipped to handle.
And now, the gigafactories are on their way. Rondo has partnered with one of its investors, Thailand-based Siam Cement Group, to scale production of its heat battery from 2.4 gigawatt-hours per year to 90 GWh per year, which will equal about 200-300 battery units. This expanded facility would be the largest battery manufacturing plant in the world today — about 2.5 times the size of Tesla’s Gigafactory in Nevada.
Rondo, which has raised $82 million to date, says it can scale rapidly because its tech is already so well understood. It relies on the same type of refractory brick that’s found in Cowper stoves, a centuries old technology used to recycle heat from blast furnaces.
In Rondo’s case, renewable electricity is used to heat the bricks instead. Then, air is blown through the bricks and superheated to over 1,000° Celsius before being delivered to the end customer as either heat through a short high-temperature duct or as steam through a standard boiler tube.
“We’re using exactly the same heating element material that’s in your toaster, exactly the same brick material that’s in all those steel mills, exactly the same boiler design and boiler materials so that we have as little to prove as possible,” O’Donnell says.
Currently, Rondo operates one small, 2 megawatt-hour commercial facility at a Calgren ethanol plant in California. The company hopes to expand its U.S. footprint, something the IRA will help catalyze. Last month’s guidelines from the IRS clarify that thermal batteries are eligible for a $45 per kilowatt-hour tax credit, which will help them compete with cheap natural gas in the U.S.
Antora is already planning to produce batteries domestically, recently launching its new manufacturing facility in San Jose, California. The company has raised $80 million to date, and operates a pilot plant in Fresno, California. Similar to Rondo, Antora’s tech relies on common materials, in this case low-grade carbon blocks. “It’s an extremely low-cost material. It’s produced at vast scales already,” says Briggs.
Antora’s carbon blocks.Courtesy of Antora Energy
When heated with renewable electricity, these blocks emit an intense glow. Much like the sun, that thermal glow can then be released as a beam of 1,500° Celsius heat and light through a shutter on the box.
“And you can do one of two things with that beam of light. One, you can let that deliver thermal energy to an industrial process,” says Briggs. Or Antora’s specialized thermophotovoltaic panels can convert that hot light back into electricity for a variety of end uses.
It’s all very promising, but ultimately unproven at scale, and the companies wouldn’t disclose early customers or projects. But they have some big names behind them. Both Antora and Rondo are backed by the Bill Gates-funded Breakthrough Energy Ventures. Antora also receives funding from Lowercarbon Capital, Shell Ventures, and BHP Ventures, indicating that the oil, gas, petrochemical, and mining industries are taking note.
Along with funding from Energy Impact Partners, Rondo has a plethora of industry backers too, including Siam Cement Group, TITAN Cement Group, mining giant Rio Tinto, Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund, Saudi chemicals company SABIC, and oil company Saudi Aramco.
“The investors that just joined us have giant needs,” O’Donnell says of the company’s decision to massively ramp up manufacturing. “Rio Tinto has announced 50% decarbonization by 2030. Microsoft is buying 24-hour time-matched energy in all kinds of places. SABIC and Aramco have enormous steam needs that they want to decarbonize.”
Primary uses of this tech will likely include chemical manufacturing, mineral refining, food processing and paper and biofuel production. Industries like these, which require heat below 1,000° Celsius (and often much less), account for 68% of all industrial emissions. While steel and cement production are two of industry’s biggest emitters, their heat needs can exceed 1,500° Celsius, temperatures that Rondo and Antora admit are more technically challenging to achieve.
In any case, 2024 is the year when hot rocks could start making a dent in decarbonization. The IRA’s tax credits mean this emergent tech could become competitive in more markets, beyond areas with excess renewable power or substantial carbon taxes. This is the year that Antora says they’ll begin mass production, and Rondo’s first commercial projects are expected to come online.
As O’Donnell says, “This is not 10 years away. It’s not five years away. It’s right now.”
Editor’s note: This article was updated after publication to account for emerging electrolyzer technologies.
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Businesses were already bracing for a crash. Then came another 50% tariff on Chinese goods.
When I wrote Heatmap’s guide to driving less last year, I didn’t anticipate that a good motivation for doing so would be that every car in America was about to get a lot more expensive.
Then again, no one saw the breadth and depth of the Trump administration’s tariffs coming. “We would characterize this slate of tariffs as ‘worse than the worst case scenario,’” one group of veteran securities analysts wrote in a note to investors last week, a sentiment echoed across Wall Street and reflected in four days of stock market turmoil so far.
But if the economic downturn has renewed your interest in purchasing a bike or e-bike, you’ll want to act fast — and it may already be too late. Because Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs stack on top of his other tariffs and duties, the U.S. bicycle trade association PeopleForBikes calculated that beginning on April 9, the day the newest tariffs come into effect, the duty on e-bikes from China would be 79%, up from nothing at all under President Biden. The tariff on most non-electric bikes from China, meanwhile, would spike to 90%, up from 11% on January 1 of this year. Then on Tuesday, the White House announced that it would add another 50% tariff on China on top of that whole tariff stack, starting Wednesday, in retaliation for Beijing’s counter-tariffs.
Prior to the latest announcement, Jay Townley, a founding partner of the cycling industry consulting firm Human Powered Solutions, had told me that if the Trump administration actually followed through on a retaliatory 50% tariff on top of those duties, then “we’re out of business because nobody can afford to bring in a bicycle product at 100% or more in tariffs.”
It’s difficult to overstate how existential the tariffs are for the bicycle industry. Imports account for 97% of the bikes purchased in the United States, of which 87% come from China, making it “one of the most import-dependent and China-dependent industries in the U.S.,” according to a 2021 analysis by the Coalition for a Prosperous America, which advocates for trade-protectionist policies.
Many U.S. cycling brands have grumbled for years about America’s relatively generous de minimis exemption, a policy of waiving duties on items valued at less than $800. The loophole — which is what enables shoppers to buy dirt-cheap clothes from brands like Temu, Shein, and Alibaba — has also allowed for uncertified helmets and non-compliant e-bikes and e-bike batteries to flood the U.S. market. These batteries, which are often falsely marketed as meeting international safety standards, have been responsible for deadly e-bike fires in places like New York City. “A going retail for a good lithium-ion replacement battery for an e-bike is $800 to $1,000,” Townley said. “You look online, and you’ll see batteries at $350, $400, that come direct to you from China under the de minimis exemption.”
Cyclingnews reported recently that Robert Margevicius, the executive vice president of the American bicycle giant Specialized, had filed a complaint with the Trump administration over losing “billions in collectable tariffs” through the loophole. A spokesperson for Specialized defended Margevicius’ comment by calling it an “industry-wide position that is aligned with PeopleForBikes.” (Specialized did not respond to a request for clarification from Heatmap, though a spokesperson told Cyclingnews that de minimis imports permit “unsafe products and intellectual property violation.” PeopleForBikes’ general and policy counsel Matt Moore told me in an email that “we have supported reforming the way the U.S. treats low-value de minimis imports for several years.”)
Trump indeed axed China’s de minimis exemption as part of his April 2 tariffs — a small win for the U.S. bicycle brands. But any protection afforded by duties on cheap imported bikes and e-bikes will be erased by the damage from high tariffs imposed on China and other Asian countries. Fewer than 500,000 bicycles in a 10 million-unit market are even assembled in the United States, and essentially none is entirely manufactured here. “We do not know how to make a bike,” Townley told me flatly. Though a number of major U.S. brands employ engineers to design their bikes, when it comes to home-shoring manufacturing, “all of that knowledge resides in Taiwan, China, Vietnam. It isn’t here.”
In recent years, Chinese factories had become “very proficient at shipping goods from third-party countries” in order to avoid European anti-dumping duties, as well as leftover tariffs from Trump’s first term, Rick Vosper, an industry veteran and columnist at Bicycle Retailer and Industry News, told me. “Many Chinese companies built bicycle assembly plants in Vietnam specifically so the sourcing sticker would not say ‘made in China,’” he added. Of course, those bikes and component parts are now also subject to Trump’s tariffs, which are as high as 57% for Vietnam, 60% for Cambodia, and 43% for Taiwan for most bikes. (A potential added tariff on countries that import oil from Venezuela could bump them even higher.)
The tariffs could not come at a worse time for the industry. 2019 marked one of the slowest years for the U.S. specialty retail bike business in two decades, so when COVID hit — and suddenly everyone wanted a bicycle as a way of exercising and getting around — there was “no inventory to be had, but a huge influx of customers,” Vosper told me. In response, “major players put in huge increases in their orders.”
But by 2023, the COVID-induced demand had evaporated, leaving suppliers with hundreds of millions of dollars in inventory that they couldn’t move. Even by discounting wholesale prices below their own cost to make the product and offering buy-one-get-one deals, dealers couldn’t get the bikes off their hands. “All the people who wanted to buy a bike during COVID have bought a bike and are not ready to buy another one anytime soon,” Vosper said.
Going into 2025, many retailers were still dealing with the COVID-induced bicycle glut; Mike Blok, the founder of Brooklyn Carbon Bike Company in New York City, told me he could think of three or four tristate-area shops off the top of his head that have closed in recent months because they were sitting on inventory.
Blok, however, was cautiously optimistic about his own position. While he stressed that he isn’t a fan of the tariffs, he also largely sells pre-owned bikes. On the low end of the market, the tariffs will likely raise prices no more than about $15 or $20, which might not make much of a difference to consumer behavior. But for something like a higher-end carbon fiber bike, which can run $2,700 or higher and is almost entirely produced in Taiwan, the tariffs could mean an increase of hundreds of dollars for customers. “I think what that will mean for me is that more folks will be open to the pre-owned option,” Blok said, although he also anticipates his input costs for repairs and tuning will go up.
But there’s a bigger, and perhaps even more obvious, problem for bike retailers beyond their products becoming more expensive. “What I sell is not a staple good; people don’t need a bike,” Blok reminded me. “So as folks’ discretionary income diminishes because other things become more expensive, they’ll have less to spend on discretionary items.”
Townley, the industry consultant, confirmed that many major cycling brands had already seen the writing on the wall before Trump announced his tariffs and begun to pivot to re-sale. Bicycling Magazine, a hobbyist publication, is even promoting “buying used” as one of its “tips to help you save” under Trump’s tariffs. Savvy retailers might be able to pivot and rely on their service, customer loyalty, and re-sale businesses to stay afloat during the hard days ahead; Moore of PeopleForBikes also noted that “repair services may increase” as people look to fix what they already have.
And if you don’t have a bike or e-bike but were thinking about getting one as a way to lighten your car dependency, decarbonize your life, or just because they’re cool, “there are still good values to be found,” Moore went on. “Now is a great time to avoid a likely increase in prices.” Townley anticipated that depending on inventory, we’re likely 30 to 40 days away from seeing prices go up.
In the meantime, cycling organizations are scrambling to keep their members abreast of the coming changes. “PeopleForBikes is encouraging our members to contact their elected representatives about the very real impacts these tariffs will have on their companies and our industry,” Moore told me. The National Bicycle Dealers Association, a nonprofit supporting specialty bicycle retailers, has teamed up with the D.C.-based League of American Bicyclists, a ridership organization, to explore lobbying lawmakers for the first time in decades in the hopes that some might oppose the tariffs or explore carve-outs for the industry.
But Townley, whose firm Human Powered Solutions is assisting in NBDA’s effort, shared a grim conversation he had at a recent trade show in Las Vegas, where a new board member at a cycling organization had asked him “what can we do” about Trump’s tariffs.
“I said, ‘You’re out of time,” Townley recalled. “There isn’t much that can be done. All we can do is react.”
Any household savings will barely make a dent in the added costs from Trump’s many tariffs.
Donald Trump’s tariffs — the “fentanyl” levies on Canada, China, and Mexico, the “reciprocal” tariffs on nearly every country (and some uninhabited islands), and the global 10% tariff — will almost certainly cause consumer goods on average to get more expensive. The Yale Budget Lab estimates that in combination, the tariffs Trump has announced so far in his second term will cause prices to rise 2.3%, reducing purchasing power by $3,800 per year per household.
But there’s one very important consumer good that seems due to decline in price.
Trump administration officials — including the president himself — have touted cheaper oil to suggest that the economic response to the tariffs hasn’t been all bad. On Sunday, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent told NBC, “Oil prices went down almost 15% in two days, which impacts working Americans much more than the stock market does.”
Trump picked up this line on Truth Social Monday morning. “Oil prices are down, interest rates are down (the slow moving Fed should cut rates!), food prices are down, there is NO INFLATION,” he wrote. He then spent the day posting quotes from Fox Business commentators echoing that idea, first Maria Bartiromo (“Rates are plummeting, oil prices are plummeting, deregulation is happening. President Trump is not going to bend”) then Charles Payne (“What we’re not talking about is, oil was $76, now it’s $65. Gasoline prices are going to plummet”).
But according to Neil Dutta, head of economic research at Renaissance Macro Research, pointing to falling oil prices as a stimulus is just another example of the “4D chess” theory, under which some market participants attribute motives to Trump’s trade policy beyond his stated goal of reducing trade deficits to as near zero (or surplus!) as possible.
Instead, oil markets are primarily “responding to the recession risk that comes from the tariff and the trade war,” Dutta told me. “That is the main story.” In short, oil markets see less global trade and less global production, and therefore falling demand for oil. The effect on household consumption, he said, was a “second order effect.”
It is true that falling oil prices will help “stabilize consumption,” Dutta told me (although they could also devastate America’s own oil industry). “It helps. It’ll provide some lift to real income growth for consumers, because they’re not spending as much on gasoline.” But “to fully offset the trade war effects, you basically need to get oil down to zero.”
That’s confirmed by some simple and extremely back of the envelope math. In 2023, households on average consumed about 700 gallons of gasoline per year, based on Energy Information Administration calculations that the average gasoline price in 2023 was $3.52, while the Bureau of Labor Statistics put average household gasoline expenditures at about $2,450.
Let’s generously assume that due to the tariffs and Trump’s regulatory and diplomatic efforts, gas prices drop from the $3.26 they were at on Monday, according to AAA, to $2.60, the average price in 2019. (GasBuddy petroleum analyst Patrick De Haanwrote Monday that the tariffs combined with OPEC+ production hikes could lead gas prices “to fall below $3 per gallon.”)
Let’s also assume that this drop in gas prices does not cause people to drive more or buy less fuel-efficient vehicles. In that case, those same 700 gallons cost the average American $1,820, which would generate annual savings of $630 on average per household. If we went to the lowest price since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, about $3 per gallon, total consumption of 700 gallons would cost a household about $2,100, saving $350 per household per year.
That being said, $1,820 is a pretty low level for annual gasoline consumption. In 2021, as the economy was recovering from the Covid recession and before gas prices popped, annual gasoline expenditures only got as low as $1,948; in 2020 — when oil prices dropped to literally negative dollars per barrel and gas prices got down to $1.85 a gallon — annual expenditures were just over $1,500.
In any case, if you remember the opening paragraphs of this story, even the most generous estimated savings would go nowhere near surmounting the overall rise in prices forecast by the Yale Budget Lab. $630 is less than $3,800! (JPMorgan has forecast a more mild increase in prices of 1% to 1.5%, but agrees that prices will likely rise and purchasing power will decline.)
But maybe look at it this way: You might be able to drive a little more than you expected to, even as your costs elsewhere are going up. Just please be careful! You don’t want to get into a bad accident and have to replace your car: New car prices are expected to rise by several thousand dollars due to Trump’s tariffs.
With cars about to get more expensive, it might be time to start tinkering.
More than a decade ago, when I was a young editor at Popular Mechanics, we got a Nissan Leaf. It was a big deal. The magazine had always kept long-term test cars to give readers a full report of how they drove over weeks and months. A true test of the first true production electric vehicle from a major car company felt like a watershed moment: The future was finally beginning. They even installed a destination charger in the basement of the Hearst Corporation’s Manhattan skyscraper.
That Leaf was a bit of a lump, aesthetically and mechanically. It looked like a potato, got about 100 miles of range, and delivered only 110 horsepower or so via its electric motors. This made the O.G. Leaf a scapegoat for Top Gear-style car enthusiasts eager to slander EVs as low-testosterone automobiles of the meek, forced upon an unwilling population of drivers. Once the rise of Tesla in the 2010s had smashed that paradigm and led lots of people to see electric vehicles as sexy and powerful, the original Leaf faded from the public imagination, a relic of the earliest days of the new EV revolution.
Yet lots of those cars are still around. I see a few prowling my workplace parking garage or roaming the streets of Los Angeles. With the faded performance of their old batteries, these long-running EVs aren’t good for much but short-distance city driving. Ignore the outdated battery pack for a second, though, and what surrounds that unit is a perfectly serviceable EV.
That’s exactly what a new brand of EV restorers see. Last week, car site The Autopiancovered DIYers who are scooping up cheap old Leafs, some costing as little as $3,000, and swapping in affordable Chinese-made 62 kilowatt-hour battery units in place of the original 24 kilowatt-hour units to instantly boost the car’s range to about 250 miles. One restorer bought a new battery on the Chinese site Alibaba for $6,000 ($4,500, plus $1,500 to ship that beast across the sea).
The possibility of the (relatively) simple battery swap is a longtime EV owner’s daydream. In the earlier days of the electrification race, many manufacturers and drivers saw simple and quick battery exchange as the solution for EV road-tripping. Instead of waiting half an hour for a battery to recharge, you’d swap your depleted unit for a fully charged one and be on your way. Even Tesla tested this approach last decade before settling for good on the Supercharger network of fast-charging stations.
There are still companies experimenting with battery swaps, but this technology lost. Other EV startups and legacy car companies that followed Nissan and Tesla into making production EVs embraced the rechargeable lithium-ion battery that is meant to be refilled at a fast-charging station and is not designed to be easily removed from the vehicle. Buy an electric vehicle and you’re buying a big battery with a long warranty but no clear plan for replacement. The companies imagine their EVs as something like a smartphone: It’s far from impossible to replace the battery and give the car a new life, but most people won’t bother and will simply move on to a new car when they can’t take the limitations of their old one anymore.
I think about this impasse a lot. My 2019 Tesla Model 3 began its life with a nominal 240 miles of range. Now that the vehicle has nearly six years and 70,000 miles on it, its maximum range is down to just 200, while its functional range at highway speed is much less than that. I don’t want to sink money into another vehicle, which means living with an EV’s range that diminishes as the years go by.
But what if, one day, I replaced its battery? Even if it costs thousands of dollars to achieve, a big range boost via a new battery would make an older EV feel new again, and at a cost that’s still far less than financing a whole new car. The thought is even more compelling in the age of Trump-imposed tariffs that will raise already-expensive new vehicles to a place that’s simply out of reach for many people (though new battery units will be heavily tariffed, too).
This is no simple weekend task. Car enthusiasts have been swapping parts and modifying gas-burning vehicles since the dawn of the automotive age, but modern EVs aren’t exactly made with the garage mechanic in mind. Because so few EVs are on the road, there is a dearth of qualified mechanics and not a huge population of people with the savvy to conduct major surgery on an electric car without electrocuting themselves. A battery-replacing owner would need to acquire not only the correct pack but also potentially adapters and other equipment necessary to make the new battery play nice with the older car. Some Nissan Leaf modifiers are finding their replacement packs aren’t exactly the same size, shape or weight, The Autopian says, meaning they need things like spacers to make the battery sit in just the right place.
A new battery isn’t a fix-all either. The motors and other electrical components wear down and will need to be replaced eventually, too. A man in Norway who drove his Tesla more than a million miles has replaced at least four battery packs and 14 motors, turning his EV into a sort of car of Theseus.
Crucially, though, EVs are much simpler, mechanically, than combustion-powered cars, what with the latter’s belts and spark plugs and thousands of moving parts. The car that surrounds a depleted battery pack might be in perfectly good shape to keep on running for thousands of miles to come if the owner were to install a new unit, one that could potentially give the EV more driving range than it had when it was new.
The battery swap is still the domain of serious top-tier DIYers, and not for the mildly interested or faint of heart. But it is a sign of things to come. A market for very affordable used Teslas is booming as owners ditch their cars at any cost to distance themselves from Elon Musk. Old Leafs, Chevy Bolts and other EVs from the 2010s can be had for cheap. The generation of early vehicles that came with an unacceptably low 100 to 150 miles of range would look a lot more enticing if you imagine today’s battery packs swapped into them. The possibility of a like-new old EV will look more and more promising, especially as millions of Americans realize they can no longer afford a new car.