Industry

Good Heat develops, finances, and operates electrified Thermal Energy Storage (eTES) systems to deliver on-demand industrial heat to manufacturers — at a price cheaper than gas, with no upfront capital requirement from the customer.

Industrial heat accounts for 25% of global energy use and 5 gigatonnes of GHG emissions annually (~10% of global total). Good Heat's model replaces gas combustion with renewable-powered heat batteries, charged when electricity is cheapest and dispatched on demand 24/7. Customers sign a long-term Heat Purchase Agreement (HPA), receiving firm heat at a predictable price while eliminating Scope 1 emissions and gas price exposure.

Target sectors include food & beverage, chemicals, textiles, minerals, paper & pulp, and petrochemicals. The company develops and owns the eTES assets, handles electricity procurement, operates the intelligent energy management system (EMS), and takes full performance risk — customers receive heat, not hardware.

First large-scale deployment is Project Arcadia: a 200MWh eTES system for a food manufacturer in Victoria, Australia, expected to save over $1.5M annually in energy costs.

Raised $2M pre-seed in October 2025 from Understorey Ventures, Investible, 2100VC, and Foobar VC. Offices in Sydney and Amsterdam.

Heaten is a Norwegian company developing high-temperature industrial heat pumps capable of delivering process heat at temperatures up to 200°C — the range needed for food and beverage processing, chemical production, pulp and paper, and other industrial applications where conventional heat pumps cannot reach. Most industrial processes that use steam or hot water in the 80–200°C range currently burn gas to generate that heat. Heaten's technology upgrades lower-grade waste heat (from exhaust air, cooling water, or process streams) to useful process temperatures using electricity, achieving a coefficient of performance of 3–5 — meaning three to five times more heat output than electrical energy input. This makes electrification of industrial heat economically competitive with gas even before carbon pricing is applied, and is a critical technology for the hardest-to-decarbonise segment of industrial energy use.

Heat accounts for two thirds of industrial energy consumption globally, and nearly all of it is currently generated by burning fossil fuels. Decarbonising industrial heat is one of the hardest problems in the energy transition — electricity is often too expensive at peak times to run industrial processes directly, and conventional battery storage isn’t suited to high-temperature thermal applications.

Kyoto Group’s answer is Heatcube — a modular molten salt thermal battery that charges on cheap renewable electricity and discharges steam on demand at temperatures above 415°C. The system uses non-toxic, non-flammable molten salt as the storage medium, a technology already proven at scale in concentrating solar power plants. Molten salt has high volumetric heat capacity, meaning a large amount of energy can be stored in a relatively compact footprint with no pressure vessel risk.

The Heatcube can be configured for storage capacities from 16 MWh to over 96 MWh per unit, with discharge loads of up to 20 MW, and can be installed as a system of multiple units for larger industrial requirements. It achieves round-trip efficiency above 93% and a claimed operational life of 25+ years.

Kyoto offers two commercial models: Heat-as-a-Service (HaaS), where the customer simply pays for the steam delivered with no upfront capital, and Heat-as-a-Product, where the customer owns the system. The Norwegian company has commissioned commercial installations in Denmark and Hungary, with partners including Iberdrola and Spirax Sarco subsidiary Vulcanic.

Industrial heat in the 150–300°C range is exactly where electrification has historically been blocked by cost and intermittency. Heatcube is purpose-built for that gap.

MGA Thermal Blocks store renewable electricity as heat inside solid blocks of proprietary material rather than as electrochemical charge in a battery. The core technology is the Miscibility Gap Alloy (MGA) block — roughly the size of a house brick — in which small alloy particles are embedded within a graphite matrix. When heated by renewable electricity, the particles melt and absorb energy through a solid-to-liquid phase change, while the surrounding matrix remains solid and holds everything in place. When cooled, the particles re-solidify and release that stored heat on demand. The result is a block that stores a large amount of latent thermal energy safely, at low cost, without degradation over repeated charge cycles — and crucially, without the fire risk or cell chemistry complexity of lithium-ion systems.

The system absorbs cheap, surplus renewable electricity, stores it in MGA blocks, and releases it as superheated steam at temperatures ranging from 150°C to over 550°C, on demand and around the clock. The commercial focus is heavy industry, not grid electricity; food processing, mining, chemicals, cement, paper which runs on continuous high-grade steam and process heat, which today comes almost entirely from burning gas.

Deep Controls is a Chinese company that applies AI and advanced control algorithms to optimise the energy consumption of electromechanical systems — primarily motors, pumps, compressors, fans, and HVAC equipment — in industrial plants and large commercial buildings. These systems are collectively responsible for a very large share of industrial and building electricity consumption, and are frequently operated inefficiently due to oversizing, fixed-speed operation, and poor load matching. Deep Controls retrofits its control technology onto existing equipment, achieving 20–40% energy savings without replacing the underlying machinery. The company operates primarily in China, where industrial energy efficiency is a major policy priority, and has deployed across manufacturing, chemicals, and commercial real estate.

Vast amounts of solar installation will be required as the energy transition accelerates so whoever can do so the cheapest and fastest will win in the market. 5B is harnessing the known benefits of prefabrication and automation to achieve cost benefits at scale for large scale solar deployment.

Combining their satellite network, advanced sensors and software, Fleet can offer precise underground models for mineral exploration, a task that was traditionally only achievable through drilling. It increases the probability of discovering a deposit with less drilling, fewer costs, less time to discovery, and less environmental disturbance.

Fleet's core product is ExoSphere — an end-to-end mineral exploration platform that integrates satellite-connected wireless Geode sensors deployed in the field, ambient noise tomography (ANT) to image subsurface structures, and AI-driven drill targeting. The Geodes transmit seismic data in real-time via Fleet's own LEO satellite network, enabling 3D subsurface models to be built in days rather than months across thousands of square kilometres. The system is 3–20x more sensitive than conventional geophones, dramatically non-invasive versus traditional drilling, and has been deployed by over 50 leading exploration companies including Rio Tinto, Barrick Gold, and Core Lithium across five continents.

Redwood Materials aims to simplify the battery supply chain by recycling end-of-life batteries to extract valuable materials like lithium, cobalt, and nickel. If successful, it would be among the largest materials giants in the world.

Founded by JB Straubel, co-founder and former CTO of Tesla, Redwood Materials is building the closed-loop battery supply chain that the EV transition requires. The company collects end-of-life lithium-ion batteries from consumer electronics and electric vehicles, extracts the cathode and anode materials at high recovery rates, and re-manufactures them into battery components that re-enter the supply chain. This matters because the minerals inside lithium-ion batteries — lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese — are geopolitically concentrated, energy-intensive to mine, and increasingly in demand. Recycling is fundamentally lower-cost and lower-carbon than primary extraction once scale is achieved. Redwood is building a large-scale facility in Nevada to process hundreds of thousands of battery packs annually, and has secured supply agreements with major automotive OEMs. It has raised over $1 billion and is one of the most important companies in the US battery supply chain ecosystem.

The batteries powering the energy transition contain critical minerals — lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese — that are energy-intensive to mine, geopolitically concentrated, and increasingly in demand.

Yet when those batteries reach the end of their life, most recycling processes either burn off the value through energy-intensive smelting or recover it through acid-based hydrometallurgy that generates large volumes of sodium sulfate waste — trading one problem for another.

Renewable Metals takes a different approach. Founded by Australian metallurgists with decades of experience extracting battery metals from ore bodies, the company draws on Australia's distinctive tradition of alkali-based metallurgy — developed for nickel and cobalt refining and largely absent in the rest of the world — to recover critical minerals through a world-first alkali recycling process.

The result recovers almost all the lithium, nickel, cobalt, copper and manganese from end-of-life batteries, works across all major chemistries including LFP, requires no pre-processing to black mass, and produces none of the chemical by-products that plague acid-based alternatives. Recycling is the lowest-carbon source of critical minerals — and Renewable Metals is building the process that makes it commercially viable.

Conventional blast furnace production is structurally dependent on coal-derived coke — not just for heat but for the chemistry of reducing iron ore to metal.

The Boston Metal solution is Molten Oxide Electrolysis (MOE). The process uses clean electricity instead of coal to directly convert all grades of iron ore into pure liquid metal. An inert anode is immersed in an electrolyte containing iron ore; once the cell reaches 1600°C, electrons split the bonds in the iron oxide, releasing oxygen gas and high-purity liquid metal — with no CO₂ or other harmful byproducts.

The significance is that it sidesteps the limitations of the two other leading green steel approaches — electric arc furnaces (which require scrap steel feedstock) and green hydrogen DRI (which requires hydrogen infrastructure and multiple process steps). MOE creates a pathway for steel production without CO₂ emissions or any need for hydrogen infrastructure, carbon capture or process water.

The economics of green hydrogen have always come down to one problem: electricity is the dominant input cost, and existing electrolysers waste too much of it.

Hysata's fundamentally different approach uses a capillary-fed electrolysis cell underpinned by two key innovations: an ultra-low resistance separator and bubble-free operation — eliminating the primary sources of energy loss in conventional designs and achieving 95% system efficiency, a step change that already exceeds IRENA's efficiency target for 2050.

The commercial implications are significant.

The increased efficiency produces 580kg of green hydrogen per day per MW of electrolyser capacity, compared to around 470kg for incumbent systems, and could save green hydrogen producers an estimated US$3 billion in renewables capex for a typical one million tonne per annum project.

The design also simplifies manufacturing — generating far less waste heat, requiring twenty times less liquid per megawatt than a conventional alkaline electrolyser, and lending itself to modular, scalable production.