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. Rondo will use this funding to grow its international operations and to develop and build storage projects around the world.
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.
“We are honoured and excited by this opportunity to go faster by working with these leaders. 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.”
Industrial processes are powered by high temperature heat that consumes a quarter of all world energy and emits a quarter of global carbon pollution, making it a ‘hard to decarbonize’ sector. The U.S. Secretary of Energy, Jennifer Granholm, has outlined the Department of Energy’s strategy to achieve an 85% reduction in industrial heat through the Industrial Heat Shot Initiative.
The decreasing costs of wind and solar power are now making them more economical than the fuels traditionally burned for heat generation. The Rondo Heat Battery converts these intermittent renewable energy sources into a consistent supply of high-temperature clean heat, addressing the essential needs of industries. This technology presents a cost-effective pathway to decarbonise industrial processes compared to other available methods.
Rondo Heat Batteries 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 has eliminated the safety, durability, and supply chain risks faced by other storage technologies.
While leaders are facing challenges to deploy cost-effective and reliable climate solutions, Rondo presents this technology as a proven and effective tool for rapid and deep decarbonisation across the world’s most energy intensive and difficult to decarbonise industries.
