Moving waste heat from industry to homes.
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- čas přidán 18. 11. 2023
- 50% of global energy generation is heat, much of which is used for industrial processes. As much as 50% of that industrial heat is simply lost to the atmosphere each year. Industry is often too far from cities to be connected by pipework. So, how about a well insulated shipping container that can handle 1300 degrees Celsius and be delivered to small operators who need low grade heat, or to district heating systems to keep you toasty warm in the winter? Everyone's a winner!! Maybe we could call it 'Uber Heats'!
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Research Links
Kraftblock website
kraftblock.com/en/
Statista - Industrial Heat Consumption
www.statista.com/statistics/2...
Ambienta paper on Electrifying Industrial Heat
ambientasgr.com/wp-content/up...
Economic analysis of Mobile Thermal Energy Storage
intapi.sciendo.com/pdf/10.247...
US DOE Article on Waste Heat Recovery
www.energy.gov/eere/iedo/wast...
PepsiCo Factory
www.koolenindustries.com/post...
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zentouro: / zentouro
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Like wrapping a hot brick in a towel and taking it to bed to keep your feet warm. 😊
Another example of the saying: "There is no such thing as trash; Just resources we haven't found a use for, yet."
😁
"Where there's muck there's brass" is the earliest variation of this I know.
EXACTLY!! 💯👍
1300°C is not waste heat, that is hotter than many thermal power plants run on.
it's waste if it's just dumped
Indeed. I don't think there are many places with that kind of heat that just waste it.
But I guess, for the few places that might exist, this could be a good solution.
A number of buildings in Manhattan (New York City) buy “waste” steam from ConEd, our electric utility. The power plant is on the edge of the island and a network of pipes runs underground to supply the energy to the buildings. The steam is also used at several large entertainment facilities as a special effect. (One example, The Metropolitan Opera, has a steam curtain that is used as Don Juan descends into Hell.)
@@alanhat5252 That's kinda the problem, they're not using dumped heat, they're using some sort of heat exchanger ( unexplained by this video ) to put into the air to then pump it through the box with all the slag. They're not directly using the heat of the slag when it's dumped in a liquid state ( also that would only be very narrowly applicable if they did as there aren't that many steel mills just hanging around ).
I think 1300°C would be if you were heating directly with resistance heaters
Interesting to hear about this German invention. Also in Germany, there are already 3.800 nets where pipes transport hot water from factories to households and 16% of German households are heated that way.
Fjernvarme is big in Denmark and has been for many decades.
moving waste heat to somewhere it can be used has always been a good idea.
Great idea!
many europe countries have such systems. and they are better than moving trucks around.
Trucks make sense when it becomes less practical to install many kilometres of pipes=expense, maintenance and heat loss. Pipes are good if the source and customer are close to each other@@jebise1126
Note for YT algorithm: this is a great channel so please uprate it appropriately.😊
Thanks for that!
I really enjoy the industrial scale solutions as big tippers in the climate change fight.
The little guy can't do anything, until the big polluters join the team we're screwed. I love seeing stuff like this showing just how successful this type of thing can be.
This is a really good idea. Thermal power plants, steel mills and dozens of other facilities would love to sell their waist heat.
An important aspect of this is the idea of using energy from surplus renewables to generate industrial heat within an acceptable tolerance on site thermal battery. Processes like smelting could use renewables when their is a surplus to build a bank of thermal energy to be used in part or in full for a day. If power prices for surplus renewables were accurately passed on innovative industries will put in the effort to work with the nearly free / otherwise wasted power. Other processes like desalination or carbon capture could simply operate when the surplus exists.
This is why we need to improve thermal photovoltaics too.
Instead of using energy to transport that which is inefficient. Convert it to electricity instead.
I think some good new technologies just happened this year with them for higher temp applications like this here, and the energy gathered was more efficent or just as efficent as a turbine.
At a completely unaffordable price!!
@@manoo422 The true cost of energy when environmental and health impacts are factored in is significant. It is not surprising that europe is spearheading these kinds of innovations. Heat energy reuse or capture from legacy industrial processes is a largely untapped clean resource.
it should be given, freely. not everything has to be about making money.
I like it. Make use of energy we're already generating but not utilizing. Thumb's up from me.
Heat batteries are a great idea. One concern I have with the system described here is the availability of high temperature waste heat. 1300 C is pretty hot. When you design a system that uses heat energy, you try to NOT throw away expensive high temperature heat, but rather discard cheap low temperature heat, usually dispersed in a large volume of air or water.
I agree! 1300C can't be called "waste heat".
@@pin65371 I like the idea of getting power out of it.
That is, it is a lot of energy wasted. 1300°C comes for example from gases that need to be flared in the steel, oil, gas and chemical industry. In steel industry they are used, however often it is too much. TWh too much.
Is it possible to compress lower temperatures into higher temps? I imagine the trade off would be expensive but is it possible?
@@Keano70athat's essentially what a heat pump does.
Oh that's very clever. Every time I watch your programmes, I'm aware of how useless my scientific education was. But thanks for making this stuff as understandable as possible!
My pleasure :-)
Your scientific education was far from useless!
You watch and understand this channel which is no mean feat :-)
(If you want to _really_ feel good about yourself and your education, just go to the dark corners of the interweb and have a brief look at flatearthers and conspiracy n*tters)
Sounds good to me. Thanks Dave Borlace
Cheers Brian
Uber Heats - i laughed out loud...
First thought, best thought! ;-)
As a Womble: thanks for the publicity
A couple of things come to mind. First, Carnot's heat engine law; so this is a practical thing.
The other is an accident on a superhighway with 1300-degree tiny marbles scattered all over the place.
Well how many gallons of gasoline are safely moved around every day?
What's missing here is the complexity around waste heat recovery. Waste heat boilers have been installed in industrial facilities for a long time but often accessing the heat is quite difficult. Pollution control, like scrubbers, cool the gases down before exiting the process. In other processes, the vessel surface temperatures have to be kept above a certain temperature to prevent other problems like alkali corrosion. Like all things, heat recovery is best built into the original equipment design rather than being retrofitted - Jill
Heat capture for resale is best added wherever the original system dumps heat into generic cooling such as water bodies or open air . Heat input from purchased transport is best added where a relevant temperature is useful, otherwise a heat pump can be used to raise the temperature level . Video explains a lowering mechanism for this particular transport system . But ultimately 2. Law limits the reusable energy that can be captured and resold from any process .
@@johndododoe1411 "2. law"??
This is true. There are some challanges. Mostly however heat is wasted where it cannot be used continously, meaning there is no place it can go directly but the atmosphere. This is why we use a thermal storage that can time-shift the heat. The good thing about our storage material: it is very robust, meaning most of polluted flue gases are not an issue. And heat exchanger can do a lot today.
@@alanhat5252 2nd law of thermodynamics probably.
I live in Philadelphia and there is a huge local bakery for the Tasty Baking Company that makes TastyKakes. I have toured their factory and they now bake every thing with hot oil that is moved around the factory in pipes from a central heating facility.
This would be perfect for them. It would require very little additional investment and might lower their energy costs massively. Maybe our local utilities could sell them wasted heat from their power plants.
Yes, in the Eneco project we also use the existing thermal oil cycle and have a system to replace natural gas. So this is a perfect use case for power to heat. For waste heat, the temperature and amount near the Bakery needs to be given.
Shouldn't it be Kompany, faktory and kosts?
I've worked in a steel mill...when big chunks of steel are formed/bashed when hot and relatively malleable, there is a massive amount of clinker/slag that falls off it. Over and around 10 metric tons a day was being shed at the british steel mill I was in, around 30 yrs ago...so it wasn't a truly massive setup by then.
Was soon after pulled apart and sold to a chinese concern.
I was rather skeptical at the start of the video, but seeing the potential applications in industry and district heating convinced me that this can be pretty useful.
Plus the trucks could use good old-fashioned "steam engines" instead of being electric and thereby raise the efficiency and limit the resources needed to build the trucks :-)
@@madshorn5826 don't hold your hopes up too high on that one, there's reasons steam engines have fallen by the wayside in most applications.
It's definitely got to be considered though.
@@alanhat5252
Weren't these reasons mostly poor insulation and incomplete combustion of low grade fuel?
The latter does not apply here and we have nailed insulation :-)
I am not imagining an old style chu-chu, but some modern version.
Maybe a Stirling engine producing electricity for a small battery/super capacitor?
@@madshorn5826 Theoretically, this could work, but we fear it has no business case behind it 😅 You are not the first to have the idea though :D
@@madshorn5826 "old-style chu-chus" were surprisingly efficient by the time the UK government dumped all British Railways' stock in their rush to nuclear, normally getting 85% fuel efficiency from the newer engines (vs 35% for Diesel or 25% for petrol). No it's everything else, tallow-based oils & calcium-based greases never had the R&D that mineral oils have had, water recovery was never solved so vast amounts had to be carried, with most designs at boiling point & under huge pressure, there's a whole list of problems. All I'm certain very soluble but they haven't been solved & there's no moves to do so even though they're still used in certain scenarios.
Seems like this would have been great when that cold snap hit Texas and power went down. If they could have shipped some of these to key places maybe the power wouldn't have went down. They could have been useful to aid warning centers or unthaw gas pumping stations.
Just wanted to say thank you for the weekly shows. I have watched you for years and love the channel ❤!
Wow, thank you!
Pinch of salt required. How many of the ideas have actually been used?
@@tims9434 wait & see, some ideas take a while to catch on.
Brilliant, Dave! 🎉😊
I like it! Shipping containers full of heat moving from the producer to the consumer. It takes a waste product and makes it a valuable resource. Even if the heat isn't being generated through renewable energy, at least it's being recycled and not just released into the atmosphere. So there's less energy being generated overall. And you don't need a big infrastructure of pipes, just roads and heat exchangers at the two end points.
The way it uses steel slag pellets, and is configurable for different types of costumers is really clever. Uber Heats indeed.
Very interesting technology. Hope Kraftblock becomes a successful company!
Dave, this is fantastic! Steel slag had already surprised me, due to its natural ability to recover and recondition degraded soils. In addition to generous levels of some nutrients, it improves the Cation Exchange Coefficient, key to fertility and even improves drainage in clayey soils. Excellent for landfilling in eroded areas, for example. Congratulations, thank you and a hug from Brazil.
Interesting system, love it.
Once you can start moving heat around (by electric vehicle) it opens up options like turning computer data hubs into heat suppliers to places that then do not need to be close. Plus at a smaller scale maybe there is efficiencies to be gained by incorporating this product into building heat exchange units. Also any electricity power station with a turbine could store waste heat to speed up starting times and reduce waste.
a turbine could probably be fitted into the container unit to generate enough electricity for the transportation vehicle itself 😉
Could be a use for all that heat produced by the 'cloud' instead of disrupting the natural environment of those lovely fjords and many many other relatively pristine environments?! Why produce more when you already have some - heat I mean!
I could imagine one of these used when a swimming pool is initially commissioned to get it from cold to a useable temperature
Such an inspirational channel. Thank you. I just wish we'd started doing some of these things years ago rather than ignoring the problem of waste
we did, centuries ago, just the bean counters weren't so keen, plus it can be complicated/expensive capturing heat.
I really enjoy your videos. you cover things that very few other channels do.
Thank you :-)
Thanks for adding context to our ability to invent and use solutions that will save us.
this a great idea, I love seeing stuff like this. Don't grasp how the heat will be captured from sites that heat is currently wasted and have no heat recycling systems in place
Why not use just gravel stone for this? That's the way it is done in so many green houses. A 1m high gravel layer in the underground through which the hot green house air is blown during hot noon's, and recuperated during colder nights.
Gravel needs to be mined. Slag is just lying around…
Slash would actually be better than gravel for that use case, if only because of the reduced cost of collecting it a opposed to digging up gravel. I wonder why it's not always in use
This battery uses more than just slag. It's a sophisticated engineered material with at least two components, one optimized for energy storage and the other optimized for thermal transfer. It's better than gravel. If you're going to haul it around on a truck, you want it to be as efficient as possible.
@@trueriver1950 I suppose the slag needs to be broken to small size? And what with the breaker if metal parts are present in the slag?
@@incognitotorpedo42 Should name me some low cost materials that fulfil these requirements, inclusive that they should withstand 1100°C? Metals are excluded because not cheap!
Slag from steel mills? Excellent selection! I wonder how many other heat battery systems have considered this material? Sounds like a win win.
We are the only one. Took us a couple years to make a material out of it though :D
@@kraftblock5968 I congratulate you on your development and wish you every success. Best wishes from Panama.
If Uber was smart they'd open a division called just that! This is a seriously good idea especially in places like Canada where I am where heating isn't just a luxury it's life itself. There are tons of remote towns and villages that are relying on diesel power for both electricity and in some cases industrial heat. It's dirty, it's expensive and with our large amount of renewable potential it's insane... Small Modular Reactors are also a good fit however most places are quite anti-nuclear at a local level so the renewable power + battery solution seems much more "palletable" for a variety of reasons, pun very much intended...
There will likely never be a renewable/battery solution for heating.
@@joemccarthy7120 Why?
It will always require the need for conventional backup generation. That renders renewables/batteries almost a parasitic addition to the grid.@@TheGrundigg
@@joemccarthy7120So you know very little but black industry talking points from mostly unrelated discussions of the electric grid . Go away troll bot .
@@johndododoe1411 Sorry. I didn’t intend to upset your religious sensibilities.
You have no idea how INSANELY INSPIRING this channel is for me...
... and I am in fact putting together a new MSc program on materials, energy, and transition. More soon, but your channel is already on the must-see list for our students, I can say that much 😊
Thanks for also doing these deepdives into the solutions!
That is truly an amazing solution that can save billions of dollars per year globally.
I've thought about this being a viable solution to waste heat in the past. I shared this idea and was told it was ridiculous, and that it wouldn't work. it's cool to see a company actually do it. makes me feel somewhat vindicated.
it is ridiculous, at 1300C is not waste heat. If a factory has some process that produces gas at 1300C instead of moving the heat with the truck they could simply install a steam turbine and make electricity. Waste heat is something around 100C or less and that is completeley useless for long distance transportation. It can be used though for some agricultural uses like heating greenhouses.The best solution is to not have exhaust gases at high temperatures by using heat recovery systems for instance to preheat the air or the fuel or something else.
@@orionbetelgeuse1937 That was my precise thought. 1300C heat is high quality heat, that's the initial heat produced for whatever industrial process they're working not the exhaust or waste heat. If they were directly using the molten slag I could see them getting hotter stuff but it sounds like they're heating the slag up with air not using it directly from the Steel Mill.
I can't help but also be skeptical about the idea of storing heat in a shipping container to be moved on roads, we've built pipes for district heating before that would be far more efficient at this task and the implied environmental impact of that choice to have a truck ( using diesel? or if electricity it's around 42.7% gas/coal as of 2022 and that's before battery losses ) pave and surface all the roads with the very same concrete they lambasted or perhaps ashfault. What sort of world are we imagining where we're shipping around the waste heat from industrial facilities but we haven't gotten away from a mode of shipping as inefficient as trucks?
@@orionbetelgeuse1937 well ideally these companies would have some sort of heat recovery system in place. but not all of them do. that's kind of the point of this idea.
@@SkeetRadar not having such a system means either the amount of energy is too small even if it is at high temperature or the energy is at low temperatures which is useless.
Thanks Dave, another informative show.
I've analysed my domestic use of electricity (i don't have gas appliances) and found that ~ 80% is ultimately used to move heat around (refrigeration, air-conditioning, hot water, cooking). Surprisingly, I haven't found any domestic appliances which incorporate thermal energy storage - with the exception of sensible heat in hot water.
With the capital cost of lithium ion battery storage still remaining over AUD $900 per kWh, thermal energy storage in phase change mediums looks to offer a more cost effective alternative.
Nice! Also have a look at Antora Energy. They're a US startup using graphite blocks to store heat when renewables over-produce, and then releasing it for process use, or converting it to electricty with thermo-photovoltaic panels. They just opened their first factory in San Jose.
Nothing wasted; besides great amount of savings can be done and benefit whole communities with this technology. It is really a good idea.
Interesting. Back in the 80's I worked for a steel company in the Midwest US at a blast furnace located on the coast of Lake Michigan. At that time the company had permission to fill in a portion of the lakefront to use for further expansion, and the slag was used as the fill material. For a while we had a trial going on to "granularize" the slag by mixing the slag as it was being produced with a large quantity of water. This would cause the slag to break up into a gravel like consistency. The result was to be used as aggregate for cement, like in road building. Nothing came of the experiment, however. I heard through the grapevine that this was because the company wanted to keep using the slag as lake fill for fear that the government might change their mind about filling in more of the lake before the company was done filling in the allotted amount.
Dave, thank you for the great news. I hope you are having a wonderful Sunday. Sheila Mink in New Mexico
Thanks Sheila. :-)
So much potential here. Could be basic building block across for energy reduction across many supply chains. Thanks for your informative videos. Always clear and understandable.
Ferrulite does this job just fine. I am planning to put a wood oven in my house in Portugal and using the thermal mass to heat the house.
Look up thermal mass rocket heaters
Mobile furnaces? Good idea for extreme weather events.
this is the fundamental basis of our profit-generating commerce >> moving batteries around.
Everything manufactured and transported, is in effect just moving working and/or worked energy around. It should all be considered as stored energy.
Power goes in to manufacturing this stuff...said stuff can produce and/or save and/or redistribute energy when recycled - with obvious consideration for diminishing returns.
These heat-battery blocks are a very logical and inevitable step towards us all being trained to see everything as some kind of transport or storage of work/power/energy.
The very idea of transporting them while 'charged' might seem archaic in some ways...like hunter-gatherers carrying fire...but the adoption of such a concept *IS* going to be seen as a paradigm-shift in how we can make close the circle on our energy use, collection, and distribution.
Bloody marvellous.
Go on man...am pretty sure the phrase 'game changer' is very apt in this instance. About time you allowed yourself to say it ;-)
Fascinating concept Dave. The "wow" moment came to me when it became possible to do dispatchable heat energy! You wouldn't have as much of a need for a district heating solution this way, although that system would still be superior in the long term.
very interesting video. One of the things i regularly come back to and spend time thinking about. Usually about how much heat energy is wasted in combustible cars. Always surprised we couldn't add some heat capture removable device that could be used elsewhere. Would be cool to be able to say attach something to 18 wheeler who delivers long distances and drop off heat stored for usage on site then swap replacement and move onto next long distance location. instead of wasting all the excess heat energy.
some waste heat is already used for cabin heating but I agree it would be neat if more could be captured for delivery elsewhere.
@@alanhat5252 true passive heating in cars is one use we already take advantage of.
I like this idea of storing excess heat and transferring it to other locations. I hope transporting these huge heat containers into cities is not a problem.
Very intelligent way of recycling waste heat. Back in the 70's I worked on a waste burning heating power station in Europe and was impressed with the method of extracting energy and reducing landfill. Naturally with a higher population density and a cooler climate innovations as such can be very rewarding. Realizing such recourses in Australia would help and make us a smarter country. Thanks for this video.
You included the Wombles! As an Aussie kid growing up with a bunch of British TV - I laughed out loud. Love your work - such a good story
This will only make sense if you consume less fuel in shipping the units than you save in using the stored heat. Might make more sense as a supplement to cogen plants, to smooth out heat production. Similar to chilled water or ice towers for trigen. Also, how are they getting the waste heat up to 1300+ C to store it? Are they running some kind of power cycle/heat pump? Or relying on all waste heat sources being that hot? And in either case, would it make more sense to convert that heat to electricity instead? Especially for long distance transport. Lots of questions. Still has some potential, though.
I was also wondering why they wouldn't use the heat to generate electricity. Because with 1300°C you could run a heat engine at a theoretical Carnot efficiency of almost 80%.
@@pin65371 shipping containers are well sealed
Hey there. This is true, the radius is limited for it to make sense. As for the 1300°C: Think about flare gases which make a huge portion of the waste heat in steel and chemical industry and flares are also used in the oil&gas industry.
@@pin65371 Please dont.
Imagine using some of the heat from the container to boil water and create steam to run an external combustion engine. A green steam engine!
Sounds amazing, another great find, thanks!
Glad to see the environment being accounted for in new designs.
Thank you for taking the time to look at our technology! The possibilities with this are huge, wether it is stationary or mobile, from ceramic to glass and steel, from a coupling heat sectors to heat districts. Thermal storages not only transport power as heat but can have a great impact on sufficiency.
Outside the UK but subliminally exposed to Womble lore from infancy. I was astonished to learn as an adult that Wimbledon Common was a real place, which I then visited. I can't say I was actually surprised, in my mid-20s, to see no evidence of actual Wombles, but I was a little bit sad. Good to know they are making good use of the steel slag they find.
"Uber Heats" is a great name, I reject your rejection of it
This sounds a lot like a superconductor. Uber heats is the way.
We had the Wombles in OZ when I was young!
You've made me aware of Edward de Bono,....... Heat in a container can be trailered. By a lorry that is delivering goods to the heat generating factory, one should think......
I have old school pea gravel in my thermal mass. The Sun warmed it nicely today.
Great video Dave, thanks for this. Have a great day. :)
Data centres would seem to be a good source of waste heat, albeit at a lower level. It would go a long way to overcoming the objections that always arise when planning permission is sought. It’s one area of business that isn’t going away soon.
The problem is the low temp heat. It can only heat the battery to the temperature of the heat, so the battery won't contain enough energy to be worthwhile. You'd need to use a heat pump to concentrate the heat, but that would be expensive.
Expensive and heat pumps simply can't output heat that hot. Maybe you could extract the low temperature heat from the data centre and then do the rest with resistive heaters, but I'm not sure how well the economics would work out unless you have a lot of surplus renewable energy.
@@jonathanmelhuish4530 maybe some kind of local use, like greenhouses or community heating. Seems a shame to see it going to waste.
Some datacentres are already selling waste heat
@@alanhat5252 very good to hear that!
At 3:15, you mention steel being produced 'for many decades now'. This is correct - it's many tens of decades. Centuries in fact. 🙂
Two to three millennia
The last time I was in Eastern Europe, I remember walking by a huge insulated pipe (likely Asbestos covered) which moved waste heat to be used as district heat.
Cities, like New York City, run district heat under the roads to distribute to buildings in the city.
This reminds me of delivering ice blocks, 100+ years ago!
(Thank you for skipping propaganda!)
Who would have thought that slag could become such a hot commodity !
Hope this will turn out to be succesfull solution and scale up.
Now that's bloody brilliant!
Another excellent video! Bravo!!!
Very impressive approach - it would be great to follow up 👏👏
Cold Granny phones Uber Heats 😂
This is so clever. ❤
This a supper good idea! Any place where heat is needed, say large ceramics kiln. The preheating the input air for combustion improves efficiency of combustion, and the heat of the gasses entering the kiln. there are a million places that this would be grate!
Nice to see Kraft Work moving out of the old minimalist, synth pop market and into the heat transfer business. Fun fun fun on the slag heap
The use of slack is surely a good idea, provided there is no risk of toxic heavy metal oxide dust will leak out during use. However, the use of phosphates as a binder may be more of an issue, are those are already getting rare, and the mining process is really not environmentally friendly.
Contacted Kraftblocks during my video view!
Thank you. This was great video
Uber Heats I could see coming a mile off and it still made me groan. Solid 5/7 well done.
Okay, at least 50 million tonnes of steel slag 10km from me. Ill be rewatching this several times!!
I thought you were going to call that waste a ‘Slag Mountain’ which was the nickname of my local nightclub in the early 90’s. 😊
Fascinating, thank you.
Super interesting! Thank you for sharing
District heating networks are quite common in Germany...
Canada too
Great video as usual.
I love it!
Great content as always, thank you
Uber Heats is a top tier name indeed
Brilliant!
Slag can become a commodity. Its already recycled into mineral-wool insulation (fireproof, sound deadening and good R-value). Having more uses for recycling slag is a win. Don't knock coal as that also produces coke and ash recycled into cement board/fiber board that protect home exteriors.
Definitely knock coal because it produces more CO2 per kwh of heat, than any other fossil fuel. However there’s plenty of coal waste sites from large scale past use, and here recycling is welcome. Also there’s plenty of ongoing waste from e.g China.
Roxul insulation made in Mississauga Ontario
Yeah, thanks but I gotta knock coal anyway. It is our most toxic fuel, and is responsible for the death of millions. It's our most carbon-intensive fuel. Mining it and dealing with the coal ash are gigantic environmental problems. There is nothing good about coal.
What a bit of good news!
That is a mind boggling solution, boxes of hot energy! (Uber might just take you up!) With suitably well insulated pipes it could stimulate the growth of district heating systems such as are common in Russia, (but alas often not well enough insulated). Every urban flat, office, shop, library, school etc comes with heating and hot water. If we can build vast networks of pipes for water, oil, gas, the end of heat poverty could be possible.
great!! the differential of the pipe :) you also can bury it near the house and use it like a battery, should not be too expensive to install.
NOT NEW - some brands of electricity storage heaters in the UK used reconstituted slag ‘bricks’ back in the 60s/70s. They were incredibly heavy.
Turning a bunch of slags into hot Lays. Nice.
Sounds practical.
Whaha, Pepsico is just a couple km from where I live!.. That factory has been there for decades.. When the wind is good you can smell the potatoechip frying odors, It was Smiths first, than Lays, and now its Pepsico.
But good to see they are innovating with this kraftblock heating system, very cool development I think to lower our carbon footprint.
Thanks for your "Wombley" reference
Yes! I distinctly remember a story, where a local pool in Duisburg, Germany got its (part of its?) heat delivered with a truck from the local industry, which was strong in iron production. That must be 25+ years ago now. Sadly, I cannot find any news articles in the archives. Must have been one of these low-heat applications then. I wonder if that was a long term thing or just some prototype for a doctoral thesis or something.
Have the trucks could even be partially powered by the heat they are carrying. Then they would be zero emission transport units too.
Also I think Uber heats is bloody brilliant lol.
The Wombles? Looks (and sounds) somewhat familiar to me, and I'm living in Germany. Could be that it was licensed by our German TV for some children's programme back then.