This startup has a plan to clean up industry: electrified bricks
Calectra is the latest startup vying to decarbonize heavy industry using thermal energy storage. Industrial heat accounts for a quarter of global energy use.
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Making chemicals, metals, glass, and cement often requires scorching levels of heat. Today, many of those industrial processes use planet-warming fossil fuels to reach temperatures rivaling those of lava. But dozens of companies are racing to deploy novel technologies that can harness clean electricity to help solve one of heavy industry’s thorniest climate problems.
Calectra is one of the newest startups that’s vying to decarbonize industrial heat.
On Monday, the Oakland, California–based company announced that it had raised $2 million in total funding to further develop its thermal energy storage system. The technology involves using bricks to convert electricity into high-temperature heat, then storing and delivering that heat — potentially up to 1,600 degrees Celsius — by piping it to industrial manufacturers.
Calectra’s funding includes a $1.6 million pre-seed round led by Lifeline Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm in Finland, as well as $400,000 in total grant money from the U.S. Department of Energy and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority.
“Our mission is to electrify the really high-temperature heat processes, primarily because that’s where we see the biggest gap in the market,” Pauliina Meskanen, Calectra’s co-founder and CEO, told Canary Media.
Industrial heating accounts for about 9 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions every year, mainly owing to the direct use of fossil fuels.
Calectra's materials testing chamber (Calectra)
Cleaner alternatives are quickly emerging for processes that require less blistering temperatures — generally 400 degrees Celsius and below — including food manufacturing. For example, Kraft Heinz plans to use a $170.9 million DOE grant to deploy electric-powered heat pumps, electric boilers, and other low-carbon technologies to make its grocery staples like ketchup and macaroni and cheese.
But using electricity directly for high-heat processes can be prohibitively expensive and inefficient. Green hydrogen is a potential solution, particularly where it can replace fossil gas in ironmaking, aluminum production, and glass manufacturing. Still, producing hydrogen using renewable electricity and water is a similarly costly and complicated endeavor — and for now, very little green hydrogen is actually available in the U.S. or globally.
“Industrial heat accounts for one-quarter of the global energy consumption and is a massive, $450 billion market,” Juha Lindfors, a partner at Lifeline Ventures, said on Monday in a statement. “Decarbonizing industrial heat presents a huge opportunity.”
Meskanen, a Finnish entrepreneur, said she first met her co-founder, Nate Weger, in 2023 through a DOE-funded program called Cradle to Commerce, which aims to accelerate climate technologies developed in U.S. national laboratories. At the time, Weger was finishing his PhD at the University of California at Berkeley and conducting research on thermal energy storage at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Meskanen moved to the San Francisco Bay Area late last year to launch Calectra with Weger, who is also the company’s chief technology officer. Since then, the duo have been developing their thermal storage system at both Berkeley Lab and the Port Labs coworking space in Oakland, where they keep a high-temperature furnace downstairs and test brick materials, including a graphite-and-ceramic composite.
Calectra’s approach is somewhat similar to that of Brenmiller Energy, Rondo Energy, and other thermal storage companies. Electrical currents bring bricks or crushed rocks to red-hot temperatures. Ideally, the systems can use the excess electricity generated by wind and solar projects during off-peak hours — similar to what conventional battery systems do — helping balance the grid and reduce electricity costs. Later, the bricks transfer that heat to things like cement kilns or, as in Rondo’s case, whiskey distilleries.
But there’s a key difference in Calectra’s system. Whereas most other firms use heat exchangers or other equipment to transfer heat to and from bricks, Calectra aims to make its bricks electrically conductive themselves, which Meskanen said is more energy-efficient. Electric currents would pass directly through the brick material to generate heat, similar to how currents flow through the metal filaments in incandescent lightbulbs to make heat and light. Pipes carrying hot air would then feed into the industrial processes.
Calectra is only just starting to put this concept to the test. With the pre-seed and grant funding in hand, Meskanen and Weger are working to grow their team by hiring a materials scientist and hardware engineers to help nail down the brick-material combinations and build a larger prototype of the system, in preparation for raising a round of seed funding.
“We’re laser-focused on building a solution for high-temperature heat at low cost and zero carbon,” Meskanen said. “It’s risky, but it’s worth giving it a shot for the sake of the climate.”
Maria Gallucci is a senior reporter at Canary Media. She covers emerging clean energy technologies and efforts to electrify transportation and decarbonize heavy industry.
