These bricks seek to address one of the biggest challenges facing the clean-energy transition: finding a way to convert electricity from renewable sources, including solar and wind, into high-temperature heat that can be used for industrial processes, such as making cement or melting iron ore to create steel.
Right now, steel makers largely burn coal to heat furnaces, a process that hasn’t much changed since the mid 19th century.
“If you are running an industrial plant where you’re making cement or steel or glass, or ceramics or chemicals or even food or beverage products, you burn a lot of fossil fuels,” said Daniel Stack, chief executive of Electrified Thermal Solutions. “Our mission is to decarbonize industry with electrified heat.”
The industrial sector accounts for nearly one-fourth of all direct greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, which drive climate change, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Thermal batteries powered by renewable energy could reduce roughly half of those emissions according to a 2023 report by the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, a nonprofit, and its affiliated Renewable Thermal Collaborative.
The problem, Stack said, is that there aren’t a lot of good options available to produce high-temperature heat from electricity. Electric heaters, like the wires that turn red hot in a toaster, work well at low temperatures but quickly burn out at higher temperatures. Other less common materials like molybdenum and silicon carbide can withstand higher temperatures but are prohibitively expensive.
As a graduate student at MIT, Stack wondered if firebricks, the bricks commonly used in residential fireplaces and industrial kilns, could be a less expensive, more durable solution. Bricks do not typically conduct electricity, but by slightly altering the recipe of the metal oxides used to make them, he and Electrified Thermal Solutions cofounder Joey Kabel were able to create bricks that could essentially take the place of wires to conduct electricity and generate heat.
“There’s no exotic metals in here; there’s nothing that’ll burn out,” Stack said, standing next to shelves lined with small samples that he and his team have tested to find bricks with the best heating properties.
One of the startup’s biggest champions is MIT nuclear engineering research scientist Charles Forsberg, Stack’s former thesis adviser and now adviser to the company.
“I have no doubt that this is going to go commercial,” said Forsberg, who, along with Stack and MIT, holds the patent to the technology. “I’m 77; it’s just sort of an intuitive feel of 50 years in the game.”
Forsberg said his only concern is whether Electrified Thermal Solutions would be the ones to bring the technology to fruition, noting that many clean-energy technologies have been invented in the United States only to gain commercial success in China.
Another advantage the company offers is the ability to store energy, at low cost, for when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow. The same bricks that convert electricity to super-hot temperatures can also retain that heat for days inside the company’s insulated Hive.
Recent government funding, including a $5 million grant from the US Department of Energy in January, and another DOE grant for up to $35 million, announced in March, have given the company a significant boost.
The latter grant would help fund the replacement of boilers powered by natural gas at a chemical plant in Calvert City, Ky. The bricks would reduce greenhouse gas emissions associated with steam generation at the plant by nearly 70 percent, according to the DOE.
As Stack and his colleagues prepare to deploy their first commercial-scale Hives, they are continuing to ramp up their capabilities. After several years placing orders for small test batches from an existing brick manufacturer, ETS recently received its first multi-ton order.
“Now, if you want two tons, [or, if] you want 2,000 tons, the manufacturer is ready to do that for us,” Stack said. “We’re off to the races.”
This story is published in partnership with Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment.