Shelbyville Thermal Battery

Executive Overview

The Shelbyville Thermal Battery is a Rondo Energy heat battery deployment at Diageo Americas Supply's distillery in Shelbyville, Kentucky, selected for award negotiations under the U.S. Department of Energy's Industrial Demonstrations Program (IDP) with up to $75 million in federal cost-share (combined with the Plainfield, Illinois distillery, also a Rondo deployment). Combined, the two Diageo IDP deployments are expected to reduce nearly 14,000 metric tonnes of CO₂ per year. Diageo's stated goal is to achieve net zero at its operations by 2030. The project is in early development; no specific MWh capacity has been publicly disclosed for Shelbyville specifically. Rondo raised a $60 million funding round in 2023.

How It Works & Differentiation

The Rondo Heat Battery at Shelbyville stores surplus renewable electricity — charged during the cheapest hours of daily grid electricity — as high-temperature heat in ceramic refractory bricks at temperatures exceeding 1,000°C. This stored heat is discharged on demand as steam for distillery processes, replacing natural gas-fired steam generation. Rondo offers the system to Diageo on a Heat-as-a-Service (HaaS) basis with no upfront capital required from the offtaker — Rondo bears installation and operational cost and recovers it by selling heat at rates competitive with natural gas alternatives. A parallel Rondo deployment at Heineken's Portugal brewery (100 MWh, targeted 2027) uses a 7 MW solar array to charge the RHB, with EDP providing the system under a HaaS package including installation, operations, and maintenance — demonstrating the same commercial model in the European beverage sector.

Commercialization & Traction

The DOE IDP selection positions the Shelbyville project alongside Kraft Heinz (up to $170.9 million federal cost-share, up to 11 facilities), Libbey Glass ($45.1 million), Owens-Brockway Glass ($56.6 million), Gallo Glass ($75 million), Skyven Technologies ($145 million), and Kohler Co. ($51.2 million) as part of the broadest single federal industrial heat decarbonisation programme in U.S. history. The Diageo IDP award confirms that Rondo's heat battery is considered technically and economically credible for regulated procurement at federal cost-share scale. The Shelbyville deployment will be Rondo's first installation at a spirits distillery, adding to its food and beverage reference portfolio alongside Calgren (ethanol, Pixley CA), SCG (cement, Thailand), Covestro (chemicals, Germany), GreenLab (industrial cluster, Denmark), Holmes Western (California), and Heineken (brewing, Portugal).

Scalability & Strategic Context

Diageo operates more than 130 production sites worldwide, including Scotch whisky distilleries, Irish whiskey facilities, gin and vodka plants, and beer breweries. The continuous, high-temperature steam demand profile of distilleries makes them structurally well-suited for heat battery deployment. If the Shelbyville and Plainfield IDP projects demonstrate the expected emissions reductions and economic performance, Diageo has an immediate internal scaling pathway across its global production base that no other current Rondo customer can match for breadth. Rondo's storage media production capacity is being scaled from 2 GWh per year to 90 GWh per year in parallel — a 45x increase that anticipates exactly this type of multi-site industrial rollout.