Storing Energy from Renewables and/or Waste Heat for Industrial Processes

The headline is a bit of a mouthful, but the development in this story is a commercially-available solution to two significant problems. The first is how to store energy generated by renewables like wind and solar at times when it is sunny and windy for times when it is needed, which may be at night or when it is calm. The second is how to decarbonize industrial processes, many of which need high temperature heat 24/7, most commonly supplied at present by burning fossil fuels.

A company in Germany, Kraftblock, has develop a system that is simple in concept and can be plugged into existing processes fairly easily. The system stores energy from any source, preferably renewables or waste heat, in large insulated containers filled with spheres made from steel-making slag. The heat energy can be stored at temperatures as high as 1,300 °C (~2400 °F), and can be stored for days or weeks until needed.

One project that caught our eye, scheduled to come on line in early 2025, is in a factory in the Netherlands that makes potato chips (“crisps” on the eastern side of the Atlantic). The biggest energy use in the factory is heating the oil that fries the chips. The first phase of the project replaces a gas boiler with a Kraftblock system that buys renewable energy from the grid and stores it as heat at 800 °C. When all phases are completed, the factory’s GHG footprint will be reduced by 98%.

Other projects listed on the company’s site capture waste heat from other processes, to be stored and reused later, also displacing fossil fuels.

Sweet Lightning has no affiliation with any products or manufacturers mentioned in this article.

Reading

“Volt with Eneco and PepsiCo. | Kraftblock.” Accessed May 4, 2025. https://www.kraftblock.com/projects/volt.