pv magazine’s Lior Kahana looks at how the Joule Hive™ Thermal Battery — the E-brick — can pair with solar and wind to soak up surplus generation and deliver round-the-clock industrial heat at costs competitive with natural gas. The piece walks through how the electrically conductive firebricks act as heating elements, storage media, and heat exchangers in one system, storing off-peak electricity as heat up to 1,800°C and releasing it on demand to furnaces, kilns, and boilers.
CEO and co-founder Daniel Stack explains why the levelized cost of heat is the honest metric for thermal batteries, and why solar-heavy grids are an ideal match: a thermal battery is exactly the flexible load the system needs — “it turns curtailed solar into useful energy,” Stack told pv magazine. Every charge cycle of the first commercial-scale system at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio charges directly from the Texas grid, where solar and wind routinely set the price.
