Feature - ENERGYNEST

Making energy intensive industrial heat cheaper than when using traditional gas but without the risk. That is the proposition from ENERGYNEST CEO Alex Robertson who talks to Energy Focus about using innovative processes to unlock savings and decarbonisation for clients across Europe. Turning Industrial Heat into a Competitive Advantage PRODUCTION Joel Young CEO Alex Robertson 1 | www.energy-focus.netheat, then releasing it on demand — came from Norwegian Professor Pål Bergan and proved itself in that context. But the concentrated solar market lost a cost and popularity contest with photovoltaic solar, and ENERGYNEST has spent the past five years repositioning that technology for a much larger opportunity: the electrification of industrial heat demand across Europe. “Solar thermal energy is not a growth sector anymore,” says CEO Alex Robertson. “The battle between solar thermal and solar PV has been definitively won by PV and so the company has shifted towards power-to-heat, and that will prove to have been the best thing that could’ve happened to the company because the amount of industrial thermal demand is enormous and it is all ripe for electrification.” Robertson spent many years at Vestas, working on the energy production side of offshore wind. He joined ENERGYNEST 18 months ago and brings to the role a perspective shaped by watching an entire industry mature. “Today, storage feels like where wind was 17 years ago in that it is growing very fast every year,” he says. “PV and wind are now very mature and industrialised, and storage remains dynamic and I enjoy that.” The company has grown to employ 40 people, and revenue is also flourishing fast. The product ENERGYNEST brings to industrial clients is straightforward in its logic, if not in its engineering. An electric heater — essentially an electric boiler — captures surplus electricity from the grid at moments when renewable generation is high and prices are low or negative. That energy is stored in the company’s ThermalBattery: a concrete-based storage medium that holds heat efficiently and releases it when a factory needs it, not when the grid happens to have cheap power available. “We build a e-heater, and we store the heat and separate the consumption of electricity from when the client needs the heat,” Robertson explains. “That creates a huge amount of flexibility and allows you to earn money.” On a recent weekend in Germany, electricity prices went negative — around minus €100 per megawatt hour — because renewable generation overwhelmed demand. ENERGYNEST customers charged their thermal batteries at that price, stored the heat, and ran their factories from that stored energy while the evening gas price peaked. “In this example, there was a profit from thermal demand from the weekend,” says Robertson, highlighting the company’s ability to help restructure how an industrial company buys and uses energy. GERMANY’S LARGEST PROJECTS The commercial momentum behind this proposition is now demonstrably real. In early 2025, ENERGYNEST received its first fully commercial power-to-heat order: a 3MW, 12MWh system for a chemical products company in southern Germany. By the end of 2025, a significantly larger order followed — a 10MW, 40MWh system from tesa, the international adhesive tape manufacturer and Beiersdorf subsidiary, for its Hamburg plant, the largest production site in tesa’s global network. The tesa project, announced in January 2026, is Across almost all European factories — chemical plants, paper mills, food producers —somewhere in the building there is a gas boiler. It is the unglamorous heart of the operation, generating the process heat that keeps production moving by burning natural gas, typically methane, and emitting a cocktail of flue gases. It is also, in the current European energy landscape, a risk exposure. Gas prices spiked violently after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, before coming down slowly, and then rising again. Geopolitical instability in the Middle East is adding further pressure. For industrial operators, dependence on gas for heat is no longer simply a sustainability problem. It is a financial and strategic risk that is getting harder to justify, particularly when electricity from renewables is, at precisely the moments when the wind blows and the sun shines, cheaper than it has ever been. ENERGYNEST was founded in Norway in 2011, initially to bring thermal battery technology to concentrated solar power plants. The underlying science — using specially formulated concrete as a medium to store 3 | www.energy-focus.net www.energy-focus.net | 4one of Germany’s largest industrial power-to-heat installations. The system will supply around two thirds of the site’s annual steam demand in a climate-neutral way, reducing CO₂ emissions by approximately 4,600 tonnes per year — around 20% of the Hamburg site’s emissions against the 2018 reference year. The storage system consists of 24 modules in which heat is held in concrete pipes and transported via thermal oil, designed for an operational life of at least 25 years. Groundbreaking is scheduled for autumn 2026, with commissioning expected in summer 2027. “Together with tesa, we are very excited to implement one of the largest commercial powerto-heat plants with thermal storage for industrial processes in Germany,” Robertson says. “The project sets new standards for industrial electrification and shows how thermal storage and flexibility is becoming an enabler of the energy transition.” The tesa concept is explicitly designed to be transferable to other energy-intensive sites, particularly in the chemical, paper and food manufacturing sectors, and the two companies are already assessing further rollout. The Leonhard Kurz project — another German manufacturer, in this case a specialist in highprecision foil stamping — extends the portfolio into a different industrial category, demonstrating that the model is not sector-specific. Earlier work with Yara, the Norwegian fertiliser group, showed how thermal storage can balance steam grids within complex integrated chemical plants. Each project adds both revenue and reference, and the pipeline is growing. “We have plenty of projects in the pipeline and they are all very similar, and we are very pleased about that,” Robertson says. “We see this as a model that is standardising and we are able to offer to our industrial clients as a replacement for their gas boilers.” EUROPEAN BY DESIGN The technology itself reflects a philosophy around simplistic design that improvs efficiencies. The storage medium — heatcrete — is a specially formulated concrete FROM CONCEPT TO SCALE: Engineering and Manufacturing for Economical Deployment Every breakthrough technology reaches a point where it must become manufacturable, transportable, and economically viable at scale. That transition – without compromising on quality – is where we come in. APEX Group consists of European engineering and manufacturing companies dedicated to helping organizations economically scale their technologies. We combine deep engineering expertise with advanced in-house manufacturing capabilities, supporting every stage of the journey – from concept development and engineering through to precision manufacturing and delivery. By integrating engineering and manufacturing throughout every stage of scale-up, we help transform innovative concepts into robust, commercially viable solutions. Our know-how centers on steel-based equipment and structures, including for high-temperature and heat transfer applications. On the engineering side, we specialize in design for safe, efficient and cost-effective erection, and enabling tight tolerances even in complex, large-scale structures. On the manufacturing side, we bring standardized production methods, skilled welding – including exotic and high-performance materials – precise fabrication, and optimized handling and transport, delivering equipment ready for reliable installation on site. This combination – engineering and manufacturing working hand in hand – has been proven across more than 2,500 completed projects, giving us the experience to anticipate challenges early and engineer them out before they become costly problems downstream. Our collaboration with ENERGYNEST illustrates this well. Ten years ago, this innovative company – developing a thermal energy storage technology to help decarbonize energy-intensive industries – brought us an early concept for a steel cassette, the core structural component of their system. Working from that concept, we adapted the cassette design for standardized manufacturing, achieved the tight tolerances needed for reliable on-site erection, selected components capable of carrying the required loads, and optimized the design for transport. To this day, we manufacture these cassettes. It's one of many projects where our engineering and manufacturing expertise has helped a pioneering concept become a scalable, deployable product. Many technology developers have exceptional ideas but limited experience in engineering and manufacturing at an industrial scale. If that's where you are, we'd welcome the conversation to support you in your journey. Continues on page 7 5 | www.energy-focus.net ENGINEERING Design for economical scale-up • Reduce material, labour and installation costs • Design for manufacture, transport and assembly • Engineering for load bearing, heat transfer & hightemperature equipment • Precision engineering to tight tolerances • Identify and resolve manufacturing challenges early 2,500+ projects. Practical engineering that reduces risk. MANUFACTURING Built for reliable production • Heat exchangers, ducts, piping & process equipment • Complex steel structures & integrated assemblies • Precision fabrication to tight tolerances • Certified welding, including specialist materials • European manufacturing capacity From prototype to production. One experienced partner for cost reduction. [email protected] www.apexgroup.eu Certified to leading European and other international standards 2,500+ completed projects 30+ years of experience 12,340m2 of manufacturing facilities across Europe 3,850m2 of additional space for storage and trial assembly ONE PARTNER FOR ENGINEERING, MANUFACTURING, AND COMMERCIAL SCALE-UPproduced entirely from European aggregates and European ingredients. The thermal oil that moves heat between the heater, the battery and the client’s heat network is an established, off-the-shelf technology already present in factories across Europe. The control systems and balance of plant are manufactured predominantly in Germany. “I would describe our supply chain as very safe and reliable,” Robertson says. “We are proudly low tech and that is appealing to our industrial customers who look for low-tech solutions.” The contrast with lithium-ion battery storage is deliberate. “Thermal storage in general has a very local supply chain,” Robertson explains. “It is a big heavy mass that is heated, and it doesn’t matter too much ENERGYNEST powered by AURA AURA System: Electrically heated thermal oil system 3,000 kW Heating Capacity 390°C Max Operating Temperature AURA GmbH & Co. KG [email protected] +49 7274 7006-76 www.auragmbh.com WE CAN DO MUCH MORE! Fired heaters Heat recovery Steam and thermal oil heated systems Secondary control circuits Rental systems what that mass is.” Where Europe has largely conceded the electric battery manufacturing race to Chinese producers, the thermal storage market plays to European strengths: materials abundance, engineering depth, and proximity to the industrial customers who need the product. “There are strong fundamental reasons why it makes sense for us to lead on this in Europe, mostly because it is big and heavy. It is exciting to try and push Europe towards leadership in this space.” The World Economic Forum identified thermal storage in January 2026 as one of the fastest, cheapest ways to meet rising industrial energy demand, noting that such systems can be deployed in months rather than the years required for new grid infrastructure. McKinsey has highlighted power-to-heat as an emerging business model for European industrial heat electrification, with new financing structures making it accessible to manufacturers who cannot or will not commit large capital expenditure. ENERGYNEST’s heat-as-a-service model — in which the company finances, installs, operates and optimises the system and the client simply pays for heat — addresses exactly that barrier. The strategic context Robertson describes is one of European industry at an inflection point. “Right now, gas prices are high and electricity prices are not moving,” he says. Geopolitical disruption has made hydrocarbon dependence conspicuous in a way that pre-war pricing never did. Meanwhile, renewable penetration is advancing market by market across the continent. Germany and Spain currently offer the most attractive conditions — high renewable volumes, high price volatility, significant potential for thermal storage economics — but Robertson is explicit that every European market is moving in the same direction. “One by one, each European market is shifting from a stable price, thermal market to a fluctuating price renewables market. As they make that journey, our technology gets more and more relevant.” The company is not arguing for a complete and immediate abandonment of gas. That is part of what makes the proposition credible to industrial clients who have gas boilers they are not ready to decommission and grid reliability concerns they are not prepared to dismiss. “We aim for 50% electrification,” Robertson says. “With 100% electrification, you would need to buy electricity during those weeks when prices are high. By not aiming for 100% electrification, you really make pricing competitive.” The goal is not ideological purity. It is a commercially viable first step that pays for itself — and proves the model for everything that comes next. www.energy-nest.com There are strong fundamental reasons why it makes sense for us to lead on this in Europe, mostly because it is big and heavy Alex Robertson, CEO 7 | www.energy-focus.net www.energy-focus.net | 8