Latest / Clean Power Hour / Decarbonizing Thermal Energy Storage for Industrial and Grid Applications with Nir Brenmiller #116

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Decarbonizing Thermal Energy Storage for Industrial and Grid Applications with Nir Brenmiller #116 · Clean Power Hour

• 0:50
  Nir Brenmiller: So, we are taking excess heat, and we are keeping it and we will provide it back to the plant at 3pm.
• 0:58
  Nir Brenmiller: Thus, we were saving all the guests that will come to waste.
• 1:02
  Nir Brenmiller: Also, we will enable the plant to provide grid balancing to his own assets and nail assets for a single night. So in the future, they will be able to provide themselves with Paracin services to the wind farms
• 1:19
  Tim Montague: Today on the Clean Power Hour decarbonizing thermal energy storage, or industrial and Grid applications. I'm Tim Montague, your host today on the Clean Power Hour, my guest today is Nir Brenmiller. He's the CEO of Brenmiller energy. And they have a very interesting technology that is replacing fossil assets both for industrial and Grid applications. I want to encourage you, my listeners to check out all of our content at clean power hour.com Please subscribe to the YouTube channel, just go to clean power hour.com, hit the YouTube icon and subscribe to the show.
• 1:57
  Tim Montague: Please give us a rating and review on Apple and Spotify.
• 2:01
  Tim Montague: That is how other people will find this content. With that, welcome to the show Nir Brenmiller.
• 2:08
  Nir Brenmiller: Thank you, Dean, thank you for having me.
• 2:11
  Tim Montague: I'm on a tear with thermal energy guests on the show. I'm super psyched. I think this is a very, very important topic and one that all energy professionals need to be more versed in. We feel very good about ourselves in the photovoltaic industry. Because you're making electrons from photons, it is a very clean process. But there are many other things going on in the world that require decarbonisation, and we have to get serious about a huge portion of our carbon footprint industrial applications, you know, all said are upwards of 25% of our carbon footprint. So give our listeners a little background on yourself and the company. And then we'll dive into the story of Brenmiller energy and what you guys are up to.
• 3:02
  Nir Brenmiller: Well, thank you.
• 3:02
  Nir Brenmiller: And so I'm the CEO of the company, we founded the company, my father, my brother and myself, more than 10 years ago, we are coming from thermal solar, we had vast experience building designing, operating Tomio thermal solar power plants, and we saw all the issues with intermittency with providing you know, the power when the sun is not shining. And then it was clear as in order to go to the next stage, we need to develop simple low cost storage.
• 3:40
  Nir Brenmiller: And we really didn't like molten salts, because they were too heavy on operational and only affordable in huge scales. And we developed this thermal storage which heats up rocks, and then we take out the heat from the rocks by running water or hot air through the system and discharging it we are charging the system with either heat power, electricity or biomass or hybrid and we are charging the system all the way to 750 degrees C we can discharge it at 550 C but also or the range below. And then we realise that what we have developed for thermal solar is actually a solution. For so many application Grid applications for power plants, gas fired coal fired power plants, industrial heat, we saw our core competence providing heat to industrial processes. You mentioned that it's the single largest source of free energy, industrial heat.
• 4:49
  Nir Brenmiller: And then right next to it you can also find district heating a huge source of energy. And as you mentioned, we are often think about PV or wind as the target but these are just you know, these are just technologies that supposed to bring us to carbon neutrality or or carbon zero, and then you have to look where the carbon is coming from. And you see so many ways and so many applications that you need to provide. And these are just a small portion electricity, direct electricity, we need to take care of transportation. But what we do is we take care of industrial heat, we take care of heating at district heating and we support power plants to be more flexible and be able to shut down when you have enough wind power when you have enough solar in On your greed. So I will tell you a little secret that, okay, you can have a very nice day in California, the wind is blowing, and the sun is shining. But then you need to go to your coal fired power plant, you don't have many of these in California and not a very good example of a gas fired power plant and see the day shut down. Well, they did not, because they have to ramp up very fast at 3pm. And they cannot go up and down, you know, in minutes or even in few hours. So what they do is they trickle down a little bit, and by the end, they still burn gas, they still pollute, they still create carbon. And we did nothing because we are paying for the electricity for these power plants to be on standby to be available. And then we are paying for the PV we're paying for the for the wings. So our peak prices are soaring and surging. And in parallel, we did not cut emissions. Because we don't have this storage or, or we don't have the technological mean, to really shut down these problems to tell them go all the way down, don't go to 60% go, don't go to 70% go all the way down, we don't need you. And when when we will need you we will give you a heads up. So this is what we do we on on the industrial scale, we can actually replace boilers, we connect the intermittency of the electricity coming from PV or wind or biomass source. And then we provide heat to all customers on demand according to the customer's demand. And in power plants, we enable the power plants to ramp up and shut down very fast and to streamline all the excess heat directly to our storage and be much more effective both on gas burning and on operation. And by doing that, we actually enable more renewables into the grid.
• 8:04
  Nir Brenmiller: Because these power plants can react.
• 8:09
  Tim Montague: So there's, there's there's really two major applications of your technology.
• 8:13
  Tim Montague: One is industrial heat. And I want to take a deeper dive into that, you can imagine you're making plastic products, or you're making steel, or you're making glass or you're making food. There are many, many industrial applications where we need lots of heat. And today we're using lots of natural gas primarily, but but all kinds of fossil fuels, oil, coal, etc.
• 8:39
  Tim Montague: And then there's the power plant side of the equation. We have peaker plants running on natural gas, and those are very on off technologies, they're there specifically to meet peak demands in you know, high load times of the year, like a hot summer day. And those assets are running at a very high cost because they are just running part time not 24/7. And, and your technology allows for power plant owners to decarbonize that process and include a significant storage component, which I want to get into I mean, you can think of fossil fuels as storage. And now we're going to replace some of those fossil fuels with hot rocks that are then heated up with either biomass or very cheap grid power from excess wind and solar. And the other comment I want to make at the outset here is that when you get high penetration of renewables on a grid like we have in California today, that is really the the only California and Hawaii are the two markets where we have high penetration now. And the reality is, is that the grid load overall is not highest when solar is peaking at the middle of the day. Grid load is highest in the afternoon, when solar is waning, and so there's a mismatch. And so if you could take that extra solar energy and store it in thermal energy in a thermal battery, basically, or any kind of a battery. Of course, there's other types of batteries, but thermal batteries are just one way and then you have power when you need it at some later time. And it pairs very, very nicely with renewable energy. So let's take a deeper dive into the industrial side.
• 11:35
  Tim Montague: You sent me a story this morning from Yahoo about Wort love, which I understand is a water company, but a water technology company, but they make
• 11:51
  Nir Brenmiller: deep produce loaded pumps, right? Yeah. Yeah.
• 11:55
  Tim Montague: So what's the what's that story? What's the exciting news and then let's just geek out a little bit on industrial applications. And and let's, you know, let's focus on if you own an industrial facility, how Brian Miller can solve your carbon problem?
• 12:14
  Nir Brenmiller: Well, usually you have boilers, these borders run, the main source in the world, by the way is coal, followed by natural gas and other fuels. And what we enable you to do is to buy or if you have a solar field, or if you have access to biomass, charge our system with these sources when you have them available.
• 12:40
  Nir Brenmiller: Now you can have couple of sources, you can have either low cost grid power at night, in Eastern Europe, for example, you have a lot of curtailed wind at night. Now, you can provide grid services, you can get paid at night, to curtail wind off the grid. And I'm talking about very big numbers, some some countries, you have 20 30% of curtailed wind at night. And then you're getting paid at night to create to provide grid balancing and denied. The nice thing about the thermal storage is the capacity you have, you have the ability to take a lot of power of the grid in a very fast response time, not milliseconds, like batteries, but you don't need milliseconds when you're doing grid balancing. And, and then we can use this heat tomorrow to provide clean water, Steam, hot air. And what we are doing in fourth live, for example, Fort love is in Brazil, it's a huge company that the main product there is water tanks, you have a lot of water tanks in South America, for industrial uses, and for houses. Now, you use a lot of heat to melt down the plastic. And it's a Batchi process. So you have peaks. And these peaks, let's say a machine, one machine, they have over 60 machines, one each machine, for example, have four megawatt peak, and around half a megawatt average consumption. So when you're using natural gas and using liquid natural gas, and the prices in Brazil are very high, by the way, not just because of the volatility. But also because of the distances, it's a continent, and to move gas for 1000s of miles is pricey. And now when you have a burner, which is not very flexible, then you're burning close to the peak, and then your efficiency is low because your average consumption is some way around 1/10 of the peak. What we are able to provide is the flexibility to follow the demand curve using our system, then you have to you can charge it only with the average consumption so the burners go out and burn biomass. It's locally sourced biomass. So it's a circular economy, you're taking this biomass of the land field off the forest. And you know, the main issue with the with the global warming today's Matan, you want to take out as much as you can, from from landfills from from the from forest go, all this forest waste goes to rot and generate methane gases.
• 15:43
  Nir Brenmiller: So we're using local source biomass, we are burning the average and we are bringing the efficiency from around 20% to 80%. Circuit efficiency and bottom line we are cutting the cost dramatically for the power plant and reducing green, green.
• 16:02
  Nir Brenmiller: This house emissions and you know, many people tell me Brazil they don't follow the code. They don't really care about the environment. But what's going on today with the with the ESG and fair tear, a calculation of your emissions. So people are going all the way and corporates going all the way to the supply chain and to the N suppliers and the suppliers become aware very fast on their emissions. Regardless if the country they come in From ECS are not aware to or take no action on on fighting global warming. So this is what we do for forklift, we had the first system now officially commissioned. This is what you saw on on Yahoo. And I'm sure many systems will follow up shortly, because the savings is dramatically is dramatic and, and also the emissions. And this is the saving disease before we calculate the value of emissions saved.
• 17:15
  Tim Montague: So you you've done effectively a pilot with Fort love, and you are designing a much larger project with four levers that right,
• 17:26
  Nir Brenmiller: it's a full size project, it's just the first and now we are multiplying multiplying it, we took care of one machine, they have over 60.
• 17:34
  Nir Brenmiller: Based on that project, we were able, by the way to sign the contract with Philip Morris International. The tobacco company, they're huge producers of heat. And we signed a framework agreement with a corporate and under and under this framework aiming to decarbonize their production plant, and they have many spread around globally. We have the first project in Romania, which will use biomass, again, local source biomass from agriculture sources that surrounds the factory. So we take this waste and turn it into fuel, low low carbon fuel, because we are using all the European directive to stand in the in the emission cap that you got. And that's a very important to, because biomass in many countries is 20 to 30%. Of the market in terms of industrial fuel. So if you take the efficiency, you know, from 20%, to 80%, it's quite a dramatic move. But we are also able to in in the future projects, we are talking about full electrification, it really depends on the local sources, what you got in these local sites.
• 19:03
  Tim Montague: Yeah, and that's the goal, I think, that really we clean energy professionals aspire to is, is having a Industrial Heat ecosystem that runs on electricity, because it's so easy to generate clean electrons, all fuels can be relatively environmentally friendly, it just depends. It's a mixed bag, and, and you know, it, it's good, bad, ugly. So we don't want to be deforesting the planet, creating woodchips. And then, you know, replacing coal with woodchips from deforested land, that would be a bad thing.
• 19:39
  Tim Montague: And that does happen. I'm not suggesting that in this case, but but Nir let's, let's talk a little more about this customer of yours, because it's a very interesting comment company, Fort Liv, is a plastics manufacturer, but they're also a have a solar division called Fort love solar. So they're very interested in renewable energy and in the environment. And so I'm just fascinated by this partnership that you've developed, I think it's a great story. And so if I just want to recap for our listeners, as I understand the system today, you have a boiler that's running on fossil fuels, to generate industrial heat for this manufacturing process. Tomorrow, you've got a brand Miller unit, called a BGN. And the initial unit is a one megawatt hour unit, there's a big, much bigger project 260 x this. And when you do that, you're going to reduce the footprint of Fort love their carbon footprint by 48,000 metric tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions per year, that's equivalent to 10,500 internal combustion engine vehicles. So it's a it's a big, big footprint. And I guess I'm curious, you know, the before versus the after, who is a good customer? Because these boilers obviously have a lifespan. And, you know, you need to, you need to find customers who are thinking about either expanding or in some way replacing their technology. So, tell us tell us a little more about this, this project and this opportunity.
• 21:30
  Tim Montague: And then if you would, you know, to the extent that you understand it, what is what is forklift solar up to and why are they interested in thermal storage?
• 21:43
  Nir Brenmiller: I will divide the answer to three continents.
• 21:46
  Nir Brenmiller: I think that the situation in Europe and US in Brazil is the one one global economy but totally different. In. In Europe, it's a matter of now of energy security. We have a lot of discussion with manufacturers in Europe that they are afraid that next year, they're not going to have natural gas to run the borders. So they are looking for alternatives, and we provide them a way to electrify their natural gas boilers. Now, that's energy security. And then our eye is less of an issue because I am going to run out of energy soon. And by the way, also district heating. For example, in Hungary, we have a couple of projects that we are providing, we will provide grid balancing at night, take curtail wind power, and then provide this to kidding. I just saw a slide by the European Union released today, over 60% of the energy in the EU goes to heating, space heating, these numbers are crazy. So most of the gas goes to space heating, we provide hot water or steam to steam networks to replace the use of gas. And then ROI is less of an issue because you want to you want to do something with your energy crisis in the US. I'm looking for companies that either have very specific ESG goals, we need to cut off our carbon footprint by x. And you know, when you are going to a company that delivers a software, okay, they can replace the light bulbs and put LEDs and then they are okay. But when you are going to companies that manufacture something 80% of your factory usually is heat.
• 23:55
  Nir Brenmiller: And if you're using natural gas, and that's the best case scenario, when you're not using natural gas, and you want to decarbonize it, you need to do something, you need to replace something and we are enabling you to replace these and we the current prices, or Ri is extremely fast. In Europe, by the way, we also have the carbon pricing, which we are still lagging behind in the US. But in Europe, we have two lines in our Excel, the direct savings from gas. And another line of savings of carbon taxation credits depend on you know, on the country that you operating. So any factory cooperated is considered a corporate that needs to decarbonize and we are doing it in in most cases we we are competitive to natural gas.
• 24:54
  Nir Brenmiller: And you know, there are many locations that use fuels and other sorts of diesel fuels. So then, for sure, we are competitive in Brazil, the cost of energy is just dramatically higher than in the US in Europe.
• 25:09
  Nir Brenmiller: And then your Ri is very, is very fast. And Brazil is huge in hate. Brazil is as big as Europe, the whole European continent in hit a lot of production food production materials, so they are eager to find and also extremely distributed. So perfect for our solution. forklifts and forklift solar are very aggressive, and a great partner we are now in in the design stage of building the second factory of our company in Brazil, it will be owned by forklift, and then we can be very aggressive on marketing our systems there. I think that the Brazilian market for our system is amazing. And also you can get low cost power usually at night because you have a lot of hydro.
• 26:11
  Nir Brenmiller: And so in a lot of biomass for sure. And I wanted to say earlier no one cuts good trees from the forest, shred them and turns them into biomass. You always have woodchips, you have waste, you're doing deforestation for you're taking care of a forest not not in terms of cutting off the forest.
• 26:35
  Nir Brenmiller: You have a lot of agriculture in agriculture, you have agricultural waste, so No one parent's good commodity, you know, you're always been burning the waste with so it's, it's a good thing to do. And biomass is not. Biomass is is a huge source. And even the European which has which are pretty strict, you know sees the CC as a clean fuel for the 20, next 2030 years.
• 27:06
  Tim Montague: Hey, everybody, thanks for listening to the Clean Power Hour or viewing it on YouTube, we do have a great YouTube channel, if you're not subscribed, please go to clean power dot group and hit that YouTube icon and subscribe to our channel. Of course, you can find all of our content on your favourite audio platform as well. So please give us a rating and review back to the show. I in Mark Jacobson, who's a professor at Stanford University disagree, but that's okay. You know, I would rather use biomass than fossil fuels. But But I think that we need to aim higher. So but that's that's neither here nor there. I want to, you know, perhaps, you know, if there's if there's one more short thing you want to say about the industrial side of the house, that's great. But I want to die dive into the, to the grid energy side, yeah, with the power plant side of your technology, because that's something that I'm also very excited and interested about.
• 28:07
  Nir Brenmiller: I think that just just lists the industrial is a universe of of temperatures, you have cement and steel melting at very high temperatures, you have hot water, at very low temperatures, we are taking the Pereira approach, we are doing all the way from hot water to very hot but not super hot steam, or air because 80% of the industry is there. And it's easier and more economical to deal with it. You have many young companies that trying to take, you know, to cherry pick the very ultra high temperatures, we do have a long, long term plan and we have r&d and we have second generation coming that will deal with these temperatures. But we are aiming to the mainstream of the of the industrial processes. And now I'm all yours with industry with the utility scale projects.
• 29:06
  Tim Montague: Okay, great. So, you know, I know that you and I have talked about peaker plants, you know, any kind of a thermal power plant can leverage your technology at face value, right?
• 29:21
  Tim Montague: And then just a matter of scale.
• 29:21
  Tim Montague: Power plants come in all shapes and sizes, from say, perhaps as small as a megawatt to upwards of 1000 megawatts or a gigawatt or, or you know, even multiples of gigawatts. But what is the target market? And where are you getting traction?
• 29:47
  Nir Brenmiller: Yep, 90% of the power generated is generated through a thought process. And it's not going to change dramatically. In the in the upcoming you know, I don't want to say the number because it doesn't matter, but many years.
• 30:05
  Nir Brenmiller: And we are able to provide this flexibility to foresee problems, either gas or cold or nuclear.
• 30:13
  Nir Brenmiller: Because now, as I mentioned earlier, they're usually running flat. This is what they were built to run flat, you know, to provide baseload and when you have high penetration of renewables, and I will, I will demonstrate it through our power plant, not our but our project in Italy, that we have partnered with NL the Italian utility, it's your largest utility. And in Italy, you have a spot market, same like many countries in the US every 30 minute. So and you have almost 40% of solar in the grid. So in a in a nice
• 30:56
  day, at 9: 10am grid operator asked this power plant, please go off the grid. We don't need you. Now, they don't have an on off button that they can just cool down their heat exchangers and close everything and ghost and go to sleep until 3pm When the sun starts to go down and then you have the unknown duck curve. And they have to ramp up very fast. So bottom line, they cool down a little bit. They take the turbines a little, you know off off the peak, they burn the same because they're not efficient when they are doing so. And it 3pm They are all ready to come back and manufacture 100% of their capacity. But bottom line, you didn't save a single a single unit of carbon. And that's because you were paying for these guys all along the way for the availability. And now they are charging you with they are bidding for high prices, because they have to you know, you have to get paid for what they did not sell earlier, and you were paying for the PV in parallel.
• 32:15
  day, at 9: So, we are in a lose lose situation the the energy prices, the power prices are going up, carbon is not going down and when you are incorporating the thermal storage into such a power plant first, the efficiency is amazing that when you go to a university professor, he will say about thermal storage deficiencies, 40 50% tops, and a battery is 80%. But if we are in a stage before the electricity is being produced, and we are just taking heat and bringing heat back then our efficiency is around 90% Which is amazing. So we are taking excess heat, and we are keeping it and we will provide it back to the plant at 3pm.
• 33:02
  day, at 9: Thus, we were saving all the guests that will go to waste.
• 33:06
  day, at 9: Also, we will enable the plant to provide grid balancing to his own assets that enable assets for example at night. So in the future, they will be able to provide themselves grid balancing services to the wind farms, right, hit the storage with this access wind power at night and in the morning, burn less gas or not burn gas at all run the turbines on the heat we collected last night. Also, clouds come in it's mid day, we will enable them to ramp up in minutes because we are a heat exchanger. And we are always hot. And we can ramp up the power plant in minutes. So they can play play inside the 30 minutes bid system inside the s&p and they can actually earn more money. And they can provide the power when it's needed. So you need less speakers. It's an amazing solution, we are starting with this combined cycle. And then we will have a very big and important reference site to show all the rest of the the utilities. And that's that's quite a conservative, you know, space, power plants utilities.
• 34:29
  day, at 9: So being the first one with this utility scale demonstration site is very important for us as a company as a technology. So we are fully commercial on the industrial scale. We're pre commercial in these utility scale projects. We can build them all the way to gigawatt scale in one in one site. You cannot do that with batteries.
• 34:52
  day, at 9: And our our land signature, the amount of land we need is around 1/10 of batteries because we can stack them up. Right we can go high. We don't need to cool down we don't need to have a CS for the system. And our lifespan by the way is endless. We are writing for two years because you have to put some number but nothing there to deteriorate. So it's an all materials are eco friendly, no hazardous material.
• 35:26
  day, at 9: from cradle to cradle, we can source materials locally, we can manufacture locally, which I think is very important, especially for the US market.
• 35:33
  day, at 9: And especially with the current bill that just passed you know a couple of days ago that gives a lot of weight to local manufacturing. So we do plan to manufacture locally. On every location we have a significant pipeline. So you can see Brazil we have a factory its giga factory being ramped up now in Israel and I am sure in positive that many will follow on the on the target markets.
• 36:05
  Tim Montague: So you've got a combined cycle let's just say natural gas fired power plant your your bolting on Brennan Miller technology. And I looked at the White Paper on your on your website or the brochure, and it shows how the bgn unit helps the plant ramp faster.
• 36:31
  Tim Montague: Walk walk us through how at the end of the day, kind of before and after. under a Brian Miller approach or solution is going to help decarbonize a combined cycle power plant.
• 36:53
  Nir Brenmiller: Great, and I'll maybe let's start with the coal power plant, because it's simpler to understand combined cycle is two turbines and heat acts in heat recovery. And when you go to a coal power plant, so you have coal, you have a burner is burner produces hot gases, they are heat exchange to steam, and then the steam runs the turbine, and then you pull it off, and, and you have a cycle, we can and we'll replace the gas burner the coal burner with our system. So you will take excess wind power at night, heat the system, and then we will generate steam directly to the turbine. Now, you're just cutting the coal burner. By the way, in case of emergency, you can keep, you know, a small mountain of coal for a rainy day. And once in a couple of years, run the plant in case of emergency on coal. That's okay.
• 38:03
  Nir Brenmiller: Because I think that making sure you will get energy, it's a top priority. And let's talk about Texas, you know, a couple of years ago, and now you have you have all the turbines in place, you have so many coal decommissioned in a year in the US. So you're keeping the jobs, you're keeping the same facility, great connection turbines, water treatment, everything accept the burning of the coal, with our system, you heat the system with wind power at night. So we are also providing another service which is grid balancing to the curtailed wind. Think about Texas, for example. And and now you have a huge, huge green peaker that runs on last night wind and reading case of total emergency once in a few years, you run it couple of days on coal if you need it, if you don't have, you know, other sources. So that's a very important and interesting exercise. The issue with coal is that for new technology, it will take us some time, you know, to go all the way to meet this huge, huge huge sizes. We are now in discussions with with with the plant in sizing to jigowatts. So to jigowatts you take eight hours of storage, you have 16 You know, 16 gigawatt hour storage at one location.
• 39:36
  Nir Brenmiller: That's That's pretty huge. So that's the only you know, I would say hurdle to retrofit coal power plants instead of just taking it a step at a time.
• 39:53
  Nir Brenmiller: So, for gas fired, you have the gas engine, then the gas engine is pretty fixed, pretty flexible. And now you take the heat from the from the exhaust of this gas engine, you you convert it into steam, and then you run another steam turbine.
• 40:11
  Nir Brenmiller: We're standing in the middle between these two turbines. Now, if you have 100 megawatt engine and 50 megawatt steam and you have 150 megawatt power plant, we are now providing the flexibility to run just the 100 megawatt they call the excess heat violator you can run on partial load the 100 megawatt now on peak demand, you can do more than 150 because you can also you have some some room left usually on your steam turbine. So you can have like a green shoe you know, take more than 150 for the power plant.
• 40:49
  Nir Brenmiller: And and you don't you're not wasting heat cooling off, ramping up that now that the when you're ranking ramping up their power plant it gets far problem the heat exchanger is your is your main concern. It takes time to heat them up and to cool them down. Now we are a very I would say sturdy and we are always hot so we can provide the steam. It really in a in an off on off scenario thus providing this problem it takes a normal gas fired power plants for hours sometimes to ramp up for hours to cool down. So if at 10am He needs to cool down and at 3pm it needs to ramp up That's exactly it eight hour cycle you know in it Day. So we will enable them to ramp up and cool down and get off it really in minutes. I hope it's clear because you know, it's it's really fast on something very complex.
• 41:55
  Tim Montague: Yes, I agree this, this is these machines are fairly complicated. But the long and short of it is that you could take a coal plant and largely replace it with Ron Miller units running on clean electricity, right. And then using traditional steam turbines to make electricity, right on demand,
• 42:23
  Nir Brenmiller: Second Life, Second Life to coal power plants, you just throw away the burners, and the converse, that brings the call in and you take off because our electricity, absolutely.
• 42:37
  Tim Montague: And then in in a combined cycle plant, you're leveraging the waste heat from a, say a gas turbine, right, which is kind of a jet engine, isn't it that that's taking heat and converting it to mechanical energy directly and making electricity with it. And then the brand Miller unit can be used to capture some of that waste heat, and then reuse it to help that machine ramp faster is that the basic concept,
• 43:10
  Nir Brenmiller: and also take off grid power at night. So you have and then by the way, a lot of time you have low grade heat that goes to waste. And now you can just, you know, boil it a little bit and bring it back. So bottom line efficiency, and flexibility and dispatch ability, all in top notch new, even combined cycles, enabling now more renewables into the grid, because you have, you have a power plant that you can work with. And not just you know, I have as a Grid Manager, you can push more renewables because you know, you can run you can shut down these power plants very fast or call them back, again, very fast, if the wind goes off, or you have some clouds coming in, and you need bottom line, you need less reserve over your grid, you can be more efficient over your grid management as well. I see what's going on here today, by the way in our grid.
• 44:12
  Nir Brenmiller: So on high peak hours, you have 10% reserve over the grid, when the sun shines, and you have a lot of PV, you go above 30%. Now all these 20% is energy that we generated, just you know, we didn't have to we didn't have to. So it's pollution. It the taxpayer pays it, you know, and and that's that just said, We need technologies, like our technology that will enable a leaner and more efficient management of the grid.
• 44:51
  Tim Montague: Yeah. So for all my renewable energy professionals who are listeners of the show, when you're having conversations about the grid, and people say, well, wind and solar are intermittent, so they're not a solution. The retort is well, that is true, they have to be paired with storage, like Brian Miller units, which captures renewable energy and then gives it back to you 24/7 Potentially. And so, that is what is so wonderful about this explosion in thermal technologies that we now see that we have a solution for long term storage for thermal heat for grid power that pairs so nicely with excess wind and solar or hydro or wave energy or whatever renewable source you have access to. So in the last few minutes together Nir How can our listeners reach Brian Miller reach you and and then I will also make just one or two quick announcements.
• 46:09
  Nir Brenmiller: But if we have an active website, you can go into a website and in context through we are on LinkedIn we so we are available to you. We can I will send you my email and you can attach it as well. And we look forward to have discussions with anyone. We are very busy but we are always busy for more and and I really appreciate the time and opportunity. I think that you need a lot of solutions. You need thermal unit chemistry you need flywheels you need pumped hydro. It's like transportation you don't use just bicycles or cars you need the whole variety of solutions.
• 46:56
  Nir Brenmiller: Bottom line to bring clean sources that are eaten intermittent to replace the way we generate energy today, and we are on the right pathway believe.
• 47:10
  Tim Montague: Please check out all of our content and clean power hour.com Please subscribe to the YouTube channel. If you're interested in sponsoring the show. We are looking for corporate sponsors. So if you are a manufacturer, if you make equipment for solar wind or energy storage, please reach out to me on TG Montague at Gmail on TG Montague on Twitter. And of course you can contact me via the website as well clean power hour.com. With that, I want to thank you Nir Brenmiller of Brenmiller energy for coming on the show. I'm Tim Montague.
• 47:46
  Tim Montague: Let's grow solar and storage.
• 47:46
  Tim Montague: Take care of Brian sorry Nir you.
• 47:50
  Nir Brenmiller: Thank you. Bye bye.