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It’s not a thermal battery, but it’s also not not one.
Decarbonizing industrial processes such as paper and pulp production, chemical manufacturing, or food processing is a tough sell. As it so often goes, that’s largely due to the efficacy and low cost of natural gas, which can cheaply and efficiently provide the high heat required for these industries. But a number of innovative battery companies are looking to shake up that dynamic, and the latest, Redoxblox, just gained a big vote of confidence.
Today, the San Diego-based startup announced the close of its $40.7 million Series A round, which it raised in two tranches. The first $9.4 million tranche, back in 2022, was led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from Breakthrough Energy Ventures. The latest $31.3 million raise, announced today, was led by the climate tech investor Prelude Ventures, with participation from Imperative Ventures and New System Ventures, alongside BEV and Khosla. While Redoxblox didn’t respond to an inquiry about why it raised these two tranches so far apart, an SEC filing reveals that the company initially aimed to raise $22.4 million in 2022, indicating that it fell far short of its original goal.
Now though, the company looks poised for growth, and has announced the appointment of a new CEO, Pasquale Romano, formerly the CEO of ChargePoint, which operates a network of EV charging stations.
Redoxblox’s technology is known as “thermochemical energy storage,” as the system stores energy both chemically and as heat. “What the founders have discovered is a real scientific breakthrough,” Scott McNally, the company’s vice president of development, told me. He said that Redoxblox is mistakenly lumped in with thermal storage startups such as Rondo or Antora all the time. But the company’s thermochemical solution is a new class of energy storage entirely. “Yes, we store energy as heat, but we also store energy in chemical bonds. That's why fossil fuels are so widely adopted, is because the amount of energy contained in a chemical bond is enormous,” McNally explained. This allows Redoxblox to achieve both very high energy density and very high temperatures.
The system uses grid electricity to charge when prices are low or when there’s excess renewable generation. As electricity passes through the company’s proprietary metal oxide storage pellets, they’re resistively heated (like a toaster!) up to 1,500 degrees Celsius. When they hit a certain temperature, this drives a “redox reaction,” which is a kind of reaction in which electrons are transferred between two substances. In Redoxblox’s case, the pellets release pure oxygen gas and absorb heat, which is stored as chemical energy. To discharge that heat, a pump blows air across the hot pellets; as the air heats up and the pellets absorb oxygen from it, that oxygen-depleted air can then be delivered as heat to power various industrial processes or to gas turbines to generate electricity.
The redox reaction the company relies upon has been understood since the 1800s — what’s exciting is the proprietary metal oxide the company’s founders discovered, which can cycle through this reaction again and again. “The problem with fossil fuels is you can't take a lump of ash from burning coal, run electricity through it, and make coal again. But with this, you actually can,” McNally told me. “We've cycled our material through that more than 1,000 times with no loss of energy density, no degradation.”
Redoxblox’s Series A funding comes in addition to about $17 million in non-dilutive capital that the company has already received from an ARPA-E grant, as well as more recent grants from the Department of Energy and the California Energy Commission, which will go towards building the company's first industrial demonstration projects. The $6.7 million DOE grant supports RedoxBlox’s partnership with Dow Chemicals, in which the startup will retrofit a gas-fired steam boiler with its thermochemical battery at Dow’s manufacturing plant in Charleston, West Virginia. And the CEC grant will support the buildout of a 3 megawatt-hour long-duration energy storage system for UC San Diego’s medical campus, which will provide 24 hours of electricity in the case of a power outage.
Romano told me that Redoxblox also has partnerships with a paper mill and a dairy production operation in Europe, where natural gas is magnitudes more expensive, and thus the startup’s technology is much more economically competitive. Ultimately of course, Redoxblox wants to be cheaper than natural gas in the U.S., which Romano said currently sits at about 3.6 cents per kilowatt-hour.
However, this technology is not yet likely to make much of a dent in the highest temperature industrial heating applications, such as steel and cement manufacturing or certain chemical production processes. While Redoxblox’s tech would theoretically work for these industries, the energy demands would be astronomical.
The company is targeting its first commercialized product in 2026, which will fit inside a shipping container and store up to 20 megawatt-hours of energy at 95% efficiency. Multiple units can be combined to meet the needs of larger facilities, and McNally told me that they’re not necessarily targeting any one specific industry at the moment. As he put it, “We're just targeting anybody that uses natural gas that wants to decarbonize at, in many cases, a lower cost than fossil fuels.”
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It’s all happening. The presidential election is a week away, and our cohost Jesse Jenkins is back from vacation. There is so much to talk about in the world of decarbonization and energy. So we tried to catch up on all of it. Are EV sales starting to rebound in the U.S.? What’s up with the Cybertruck? And what about Senator Joe Manchin’s permitting reform bill?
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Jesse and Rob attempt to discuss all those questions and more. Peak oil demand — the IRA’s focus on manufacturing — the emerging political economy of decarbonization — we hit it all. Or we try to, at least. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: I want to do a branching pass here for a second. If Trump wins and Republicans want to pass [the Manchin-Barrasso permitting] bill, I think Democrats should take them up on it. Because all the changes to the oil and gas regime — almost all the changes to the oil and gas permitting regime that are contemplated by the bill will be done by a Trump administration. They could be done through executive action, or through a helpful Congress in a Trump administration. But the transmission stuff can’t be. So you might as well take the transmission tailwind and then just do the stuff that a Trump administration can do anyway.
To be clear here, when you talk to the modelers — not Jesse, other modelers — they say that the expansion oil and gas that happened during Trump would dwarf any sense of the changes contemplated by the bill. If Harris wins, then I think we have the real conversation about whether this bill makes sense for Democrats. But if Trump wins, I think, number one, Republicans aren’t going to be interested in passing the bill. But if they are interested, Democrats should take them up on it.
Jesse Jenkins: Yeah, so you have kind of a narrow range of circumstances where this bill might be considered seriously in a lame duck, right? I think you’re right that if Trump wins somehow they’re going to offer it, Republicans are going to offer it, that’s an interesting deal for Democrats. I just don’t think that’s too likely.
I think the most likely scenario where this bill is taken seriously is if Harris wins and if the House and Senate are split. Whether they flip sides or whatever the control looks like, going forward, if the Democrats have the House and the Republicans have the Senate, or vice versa, this could be the type of bipartisan bill that is sort of the best deal on the table that, that might be able to get through regular order — that’s, this bill would require 60 votes to get past the filibuster in the Senate.
So you know, it by nature has to be bipartisan. And by definition, at this stage, a bipartisan bill is going to have some things that climate advocates really don’t like. And if it has enough that outweighs that, that’ll be the serious question.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
Watershed’s climate data engine helps companies measure and reduce their emissions, turning the data they already have into an audit-ready carbon footprint backed by the latest climate science. Get the sustainability data you need in weeks, not months. Learn more at watershed.com.
As a global leader in PV and ESS solutions, Sungrow invests heavily in research and development, constantly pushing the boundaries of solar and battery inverter technology. Discover why Sungrow is the essential component of the clean energy transition by visiting sungrowpower.com.
Intersolar & Energy Storage North America is the premier U.S.-based conference and trade show focused on solar, energy storage, and EV charging infrastructure. To learn more, visit intersolar.us.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
Today’s lease auction actually went kinda well.
Just days before what is sure to be a close presidential election in which one of the candidates has promised to shut down the offshore wind industry “on day one,” an auction for the rights to develop wind energy projects in the Gulf of Maine on Tuesday was a surprise success.
Two developers, Avangrid and Invenergy, purchased four of the eight leases that were up for sale. If turned into wind farms, they have the potential to generate about 6.8 gigawatts, or enough electricity to power about 2.3 million homes, according to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.
Compared with the optimism on display just two years ago, when more than a dozen companies competed in a three-day bidding war for the right to develop six areas off the coast of New York and New Jersey, Tuesday’s sale was a flop. Just two companies participated. The bidding closed after one round. The leases sold for a flat $50 per acre, compared to an average of nearly $9,000 per acre in the New York sale.
But put in context of how things are going in 2024, it’s a miracle anyone showed up at all. The offshore wind industry has been struggling with supply chain issues and inflation, not to mention increasing opposition from coastal communities. Just a month ago, an offshore wind lease sale off the coast of Oregon was canceled after the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management learned that there was only one interested party. The agency also canceled an auction for the Gulf of Mexico earlier this year citing a lack of interest.
“It’ll be a win if anything gets leased,” Francis Eanes, executive director of the Maine Labor Climate Council, told me Tuesday morning before the results came in. “And honestly, it won’t be surprising if it doesn’t.”
Outside of the existential threat of a Trump presidency, developing wind projects in the Gulf of Maine was already a challenging prospect. The water is upwards of 200 meters deep — too deep to affix the foundation of a wind turbine to the seafloor. Instead, developers will need to build floating structures that are moored to the seabed with giant cables. Floating offshore wind is a proven technology — there are a handful of projects already operating around the world. But it is more expensive to build, and there are none yet operating in the U.S. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimates that floating offshore wind farms will have a levelized cost of energy that’s at least 40% higher than fixed-bottom projects.
On top of that, just days ago, the U.S. Department of Energy rejected Maine’s application for a $456 million grant to build a floating offshore wind assembly port on Sears Island, a protected area in Penobscot Bay about the size of New York City’s Central Park. A new port is a necessary prerequisite for developing projects in the Gulf of Maine, as floating offshore wind assembly requires different infrastructure than fixed-bottom projects.
Nonetheless, Tyler Hansen, a research associate studying offshore wind at Dartmouth College, told me he thought the results of the auction “make sense” when weighing the prospects for the technology against the political risks. He expects the cost of floating offshore wind to come down as governments around the world invest in research and development. The Department of Energy has a “Floating Offshore Wind Shot,” a program aimed at reducing the cost of floating technology 70% by 2030.
The winds that blow over the Gulf of Maine are especially strong and steady, making them one of the best potential renewable energy resources in the United States. The northeast is also “particularly blessed” with available substations where projects could connect to the grid, Eric Hines, a civil and environmental engineering professor at Tufts University told me. Several recent coal plant closures on the Massachusetts coast have created “an enormous amount of coastal transmission capacity that are prime locations for plugging in offshore wind,” he said.
The area also boasts favorable policy paired with relatively strong grassroots support. States in the Northeast are counting on floating offshore wind to hit their climate goals. Maine has set a goal of achieving 100% clean electricity by 2040, with at least 3 gigawatts of power prescribed to come from the Gulf. Massachusetts, too, anticipates needing some 23 gigawatts from offshore wind by 2050, with at least 10 coming from the Gulf of Maine.
Environmental groups in Maine have spent the past two years building political coalitions with fishermen, tribes, and labor unions in support of developing an offshore wind industry. Those efforts culminated in a major victory last summer when the state passed a bill that set strong labor standards for offshore wind development, created a requirement for tribal engagement in project development, and enshrined a policy of avoiding development in a key fishery known as Lobster Management Area One. Later, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management amended its map of lease areas in the Gulf of Maine to exclude that management area.
“That was a huge win,” Eanes said, and never would have happened without the environmental and labor movement’s proactive efforts to build consensus around where offshore wind should happen, if it were going to happen. As a result, they’ve been able to cultivate a different attitude toward offshore wind in Maine than you will find right now in New Jersey, for example.
“To be clear, if you go to a coastal community in Maine, especially one that lands a lot of lobsters, you’re not going to find support for offshore wind,” he said. “But the level of organized opposition has not been as pitched as it would have been had we seen lease areas in Lobster Management Area One.”
In a press release, Avangrid touted the Gulf of Maine’s strong wind speeds and access to interconnection, as well as the fact that it was “largely deconflicted from other ocean users following a rigorous federal public engagement process.” The company is already developing more than 5 gigawatts of offshore wind along the East Coast, including Vineyard Wind, which is currently under construction. This will be its first project to utilize floating technologies, however it is also owned by Iberdrola, a Spanish company with a pipeline of floating offshore wind projects in Europe.
Maine officials celebrated the results of the auction on Tuesday.
“The federal lease sale represents a significant milestone for Maine and the region as we advance offshore wind in a responsible manner to help us reduce our reliance on expensive, harmful fossil fuels, diversify our sources of energy, grow our economy, and fight climate change,”said Dan Burgess, Director of the Maine Governor’s Energy Office, in an emailed statement.
The Maine Department of Transportation, the agency leading the development of the would-be port, emphasized that it's undeterred despite losing out on the federal grant. “Maine has a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to develop a port facility to create good-paying jobs while serving the entire region as we harness abundant clean wind energy in the Gulf of Maine,” Bruce Van Note, the transportation commissioner, said in a statement last week. “Our work will continue as we examine other opportunities to secure funding to advance this critical port infrastructure.”
The agency anticipates filing federal permit applications for the project in the next few months, kicking off a process anticipated to take two years, and securing additional funding for it by the end of 2025. But that timeline may depend on the results of the presidential election next week.
While it’s not always the best advice to take Donald Trump at his word, the former president promised supporters at a rally in New Jersey in May that he would “end” offshore wind development. “You won’t have to worry about Governor Murphy’s 157 windmills,” he said. “I’m going to write it out in an executive order. It’s going to end on day one.”
In its most recent quarterly market report, the industry association Oceantic Network noted that private investment and activity in the offshore wind sector “are decelerating … due largely to the uncertainty around the presidential election.”
At the same time, developers are used to long time horizons. Offshore wind projects can take a decade to permit and build, and as long as state support doesn’t slide, a slowdown of four years isn’t make-or-break. Even with a supportive administration, it will likely be impossible for Avangrid or Invenergy to begin construction in the Gulf of Maine before 2030, as that’s the absolute soonest Maine expects to get its port built.
The fact that two developers took the leap now rather than waiting for 2028 — which is when the next lease sale in the Gulf of Maine is scheduled — shows some level of confidence in the long-term prospects for the industry.
“These leases don’t come up for auction very often,” Hines told me. “And if you don’t have a lease, you can’t build a project.”
Wood Mackenzie’s latest Energy Transition Outlook adds to a dour parade of recent climate reports.
The Paris Agreement goal of holding warming to well less than 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels is not just increasingly appearing to be out of reach. The energy transition as a whole is slowing down.
This was the stark warning from Wood Mackenzie’s Energy Transition Outlook, the energy consultancy’s annual assessment of global progress toward decarbonizing the economy. “Progress toward a low-carbon energy system is stumbling on multiple fronts, leaving the world dependent on fossil fuels for longer,” the outlook’s authors write.
Alongside the International Energy Agency’s Global Energy Outlook, which found faster than expected global electricity demand imperiling Paris goals, and the United Nations Environment Programme’s Emissions Gap Report, which warned that unless emissions were soon wrenched down “it will become impossible” to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the report completes a grim picture. The question now is less “Can the world meet the Paris Agreement goals?” and more “How will we manage once we’ve missed them?”
Wood Mackenzie takes 2.5 degrees of warming as its “base case,” consistent with other estimates, including the IEA’s. The report’s authors have little optimism left about the prospect of reaching net zero emissions by 2050 and limiting warming to 1.5 degrees. Instead, they used to the report to “highlight the potential of a delayed transition,” in which warming rises to 3 degrees, said Jonathan Sultoon, Wood Mackenzie’s head of markets and transitions, on a call with reporters Monday.
“We’re in the middle of the 2020s, the decade that’s pivotal to accelerate the energy transition” Sultoon said, “and no major countries — and very few companies — are on track to meet their 2030 climate goals.”
To meet even the 2.5 degree warming scenario — one that many scientists warn could result in difficult to predict and possibly irreversible climate impacts — would still require that global emissions peak by 2027. Emissions, instead, are rising — by some 1.3% in 2023, according to the United Nations.
The likelihood of slipping from 2.5 degrees to 3 will be determined by politics, Wood Mackenzie’s analysts argue, whether it’s the war in Ukraine and unstable Middle East leading countries to reinvest in fossil fuels for energy security or protectionist policies that block imports of world-leading low-priced Chinese renewable technology.
“China’s the lower-cost producer in clean tech,” Sultoon said. “Either the rest of the world needs to rely on Chinese manufacturing to speed the transition,” or “the West will pay a higher cost — or, in fact, delay the transition. And it looks far more likely to be that latter situation than the former.”
Policymakers in the rest of the high-emitting world, especially the United States, are perfectly aware of China’s dominance of much of the low-carbon technology stack, ranging from solar panels to lithium refining. But they’re seeking to nurture their own industries, seeking both to secure energy supplies in case of global conflict and to protect native workers and industries.
The political or security logic of these movies might be clear enough, but the Wood Mackenzie analysts are skeptical of this approach, at least when it comes to advancing decarbonization. “These dual goals — of decarbonisation and reducing dependence on metals supply from China — are at odds,” they write. “It will take years, if not decades, to shift away from China because it controls up to 70% of global supply chains across several commodities. It is also the lowest-cost producer. The rest of the world may need to rely on Chinese manufacturing or be prepared to either pay a higher cost or delay the transition.”
And then there’s the growth in electricity demand, which the IEA also highlighted. While any scenario that brings down emissions globally to levels consistent with even 2.5 degrees of warming, let alone 1.5, will involve a high degree of electrification of processes currently reliant on the combustion of fossil fuels, new demand for electricity can have ambiguous effects on overall emissions depending on the ability of non-carbon-emitting generation to meet that demand.
“The quick expansion of electricity supply is often constrained by transmission infrastructure which takes time to develop,” the report says. This means new demand could be met by fossil fuels, that the energy transition could become more expensive than it would be under a lower demand scenario, or that some crucial amount of electrification just simply does not happen.
“What happens if geopolitical crises, expanded trade restrictions, or protectionist policies becomes the norm, rather than the exception on a long-term basis? And where you see slower cost declines for alternative energy?” asked David Brown, director of Wood Mackenzie’s energy transition practice. If things continue as they are, that's a question we’ll all have to answer.