Heat Battery Storage Firm Rondo Energy Secures $60 Million Funding

Rondo Energy, a leading provider of zero-carbon industrial heat and power, has raised $60 million in a new financing planned to speed the rollout of Rondo Heat Batteries (RHBs) worldwide and to transform the global energy storage market.

The financing brings together funding from current Rondo investors Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Energy Impact Partners, SCG, and TITAN, industrial leaders including Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund, Rio Tinto, SABIC, Aramco Ventures, and climate investors SDCL Energy Efficiency Income Trust (SEEIT) and John Doerr. Rondo will use this funding to grow its international operations and to develop and build storage projects around the world.

Rio Tinto, Aramco Ventures, SABIC, SCG, TITAN, and SEEIT have joined Rondo’s Strategic Investor Advisory Board (SIAB).

“Our Strategic Investor Advisory Board will help Rondo focus on the simplest, fastest ways to power their operations with low-cost clean energy and shape our priorities for ongoing research and development.” said John O’Donnell, CEO of Rondo Energy. “To tackle our climate challenge, we need tools to build big, low-cost, clean energy infrastructure fast. The Rondo Heat Battery is one of those tools. This investment will help us grow our capacity to meet customer demand and begin to build at scale.”

Industry uses more energy than any other part of the world economy. Industrial processes making every commodity from steel to baby food are powered by high temperature heat that consumes a quarter of all world energy and emits a quarter of global carbon pollution. Technologies have long been sought to cost-effectively transform this “hard to decarbonize” sector. U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm outlined DOE’s vision to cut 85% of industrial heat in its Industrial Heat Shot Initiative.

Declining wind and solar power costs are now becoming cheaper than the fuel industry burns for heat. The Rondo Heat Battery turns these intermittent power sources into the continuous, high temperature clean heat that industry requires, and opens the door to industrial decarbonization at a fraction of the cost of other technologies.

In 2023, Rondo began operations of its first commercial unit, lowering the carbon intensity of biofuel produced by Calgren Renewable Fuels. This project was the first commercially operating electric thermal energy storage system in the US, and the highest efficiency, highest temperature energy storage of any kind worldwide.

In 2023 Rondo, in partnership with Siam Cement Group (SCG), announced current Heat Battery storage production capacity of 2.4GWh/year, with plans to reach 90GWh/year.

Rondo Heat Batteries claim to store energy at half the cost of other technologies such as green hydrogen and chemical batteries. Rondo based its innovative technology on materials that heavy industry has used for more than a century for heating and heat storage: brick and iron wire. By building Heat Batteries with materials already made at large scale for more than a century, Rondo claims to have eliminated the safety, durability, and supply chain risks faced by other storage technologies.

Electrification of industrial heat has been called “the next trillion-dollar market.” Recent studies have found that the decarbonized world will need twice as much heat battery storage as grid battery storage, and that heat batteries will greatly reduce energy costs to produce many key commodities in the coming few years.