Rondo Energy is building a renewable energy battery using bricks and toaster wire. But it’s not for your home—it’s for the factories that run the world. Industrial heat drives 10% of global carbon emissions. It’s essential for making steel, cement, chemicals, food, paper, and fuel. And it’s one of the hardest challenges in climate—expensive to electrify, risky to retrofit, and central to the global economy.
That’s what makes Rondo’s approach so powerful. In this episode, John O’Donnell, co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer, explains how Rondo stores excess wind and solar energy as clean, high-temperature heat and delivers it into existing industrial systems without combustion, redesigns, or rare materials.
Its low-cost approach is underway across the U.S., Europe, and Asia. John shares how decades of experience building global energy projects—and navigating the realities of infrastructure finance—shaped Rondo’s strategy for rapid scale and deployment, and why the low-carbon future is being built with bricks.
What is Supercool?
Low-carbon innovations are scaling. But innovation alone doesn't win markets. Adoption does. Each week, climate entrepreneur Josh Dorfman talks with the founders, CEOs, and executives who win customers, grow revenue, and capture market share—by making their low-carbon solutions the industry’s preferred choice. Without adoption, the clean energy transition falters. With adoption, we build the low-carbon future. Supercool reveals how we get there.