How H&M will push suppliers to use thermal batteries for energy | Trellis

The fashion company wants to decarbonize its textile vendors by switching them to heat brick startup Rondo Energy. Read More

Rondo Energy's refractory bricks

H&M Group is making the fashion industry’s first foray into thermal batteries as part of a plan to decarbonize its supply chain.

On June 19, the fashion giant’s investment arm revealed a previously undisclosed investment in “brick battery” company Rondo Energy. Together, the companies hope to replace the coal that powers H&M’s supplier mills with providers of renewable energy and Rondo’s thermal batteries for power storage.

H&M’s goal is to adopt 100 percent renewable energy and reach net zero by 2040.

Rondo of Alameda, California, claims its heat-retaining bricks are cheaper than fossil fuels and safer than lithium-ion batteries. The company uses electricity from renewable sources to heat thousands of tons of bricks up to 2,732 degrees Fahrenheit. The bricks are then used as heat batteries to supply hot air or steam for customers at a constant temperature. Less than 1 percent of the heat leaks out each day, according to the company.

One of H&M’s climate leads reached out to Rondo after hearing about its product on the podcast “Volts,” Rondo Energy’s new CEO, Eric Trusiewicz, told GreenBiz. Within several months, they were working together.

“It was a very quick process, and it was because they’re so sustainability focused,” he said of H&M. “They have a pretty well articulated internal group working on that, and they have already done quite a bit of thought on that.”

The Stockholm-based H&M has joined Rondo’s strategic advisory board, alongside Rio Tinto, Aramco Ventures and others. Over the next six months, H&M and Rondo plan to explore targets among H&M’s supply chain they can shift to thermal energy storage.

Rondo Energy’s model offers three advantages:

“One of the things that’s so interesting about thermal batteries is that they really are sort of a ‘two-fer,’ if not a not ‘three-fer,’” said Blaine Collison, executive director of the Renewable Thermal Collaborative in Arlington, Virginia.

“Thermal batteries can sort of do it all, or at least meet a broad range of industrial process heat requirements,” he said.

Scores of thermal battery companies are competing for funding and customers. Rondo attracted an $80 million investment in the company June 26 from Breakthrough Energy Catalyst and the European Investment Bank to grow three industrial projects in Europe. That came after $60 million Rondo raised in November from Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Microsoft and others.

Most of H&M’s clothing is made in Asia, led by China and Bangladesh. The company works directly with 574 suppliers that operate 1,027 factories across Europe, Asia and North America.

Those direct suppliers, in turn, engage a second layer of fabric producers and processing companies, which handle things such as printing and embroidering. Forty percent of the industry’s carbon footprint derives from this second tier, in which coal-powered boilers enable “wet processing” printing and dyeing, according to the AAI.

Where H&M and Rondo will first test the brick batteries depends upon local access for building new heat batteries and the cost of solar or wind, Trusiewicz said.

Other textile companies contacted Rondo Energy shortly after the H&M announcement in June, he added.

“I think we had immediate inbound from other very well-known brands — ‘Hey, we didn’t realize you can use this,’” Trusiewicz said. “And that’s exactly what we want, is for people to become aware that this is not only an existing but an actual economic solution for displacement of fossil fuels from the textile supply chain.”

“We hope this will show that we are serious about enabling the necessary change in the textile industry,” an H&M spokesperson told GreenBiz via email. “We need to do this as a whole sector, and we invite the fashion eco system to work together with us, Rondo and other necessary technologies.”

[Streamline your supply chain at VERGE 24 (Oct. 29-31, San Jose), the hub for professionals driving transformative, decarbonized and profitable change.]