Central de Cervejas e Bebidas Brewery and Malting Plant Heat Battery

Executive Overview

The Central de Cervejas e Bebidas Heat Battery is a 100 MWh Rondo Heat Battery (RHB) being deployed at Heineken's Vialonga Brewery and Malting Plant near Lisbon, Portugal — under a Heat-as-a-Service (HaaS) partnership between Rondo Energy (battery technology), EDP (system owner, operator, and solar supplier), and Heineken (heat offtaker). The system is scheduled to go live in April 2027. A 7 MWp on-site solar plant will be installed; additional renewable electricity will be sourced via a 25 GWh/year flexible solar PPA with EDP. The project is the first large-scale use of brick-type thermal energy storage in the European beverage industry and the largest heat battery in the global beverage sector at commissioning. It is supported by the €75 million EU-Catalyst partnership investment (European Investment Bank and Breakthrough Energy Catalyst, announced June 2024) covering three European Rondo deployments including Covestro Germany and Greenlab Denmark (both 100 MWh). Heineken targets net zero across its value chain by 2040 and aims to decarbonise all production sites by 2030. EDP has more than 29 GW of installed renewable generation capacity globally and serves more than 3 million customers in Portugal.

How It Works & Differentiation

The Rondo Heat Battery stores surplus renewable electricity by resistively heating ceramic refractory bricks to temperatures exceeding 1,500°C; heat is discharged on demand as industrial process steam at up to over 100 bar, providing continuous 24-hour steam supply for the brewery and malting process — replacing natural gas-fired steam generation. Round-trip efficiency of the RHB exceeds 97%. The HaaS structure means Heineken has no upfront capital exposure: EDP designs, builds, and operates the system, recovering cost by selling steam to Heineken. The 7 MWp on-site solar charges the battery preferentially during daylight hours; grid electricity covers overnight and cloudy periods. This is the only commercial thermal energy storage deployment in the European beverage sector at this scale.

Commercialization & Traction

Rondo's global portfolio at time of this announcement includes five full industrial-scale heat batteries in deployment. Rondo's 2024 EDP partnership — up to 400 MW of new solar and wind to charge up to 2 GWh of RHB deployments across Europe — is the commercial vehicle enabling the Vialonga project. The EDP HaaS model at Vialonga represents EDP's entry into industrial decarbonisation services as a heat supplier. Portugal's national target of 55% greenhouse gas emission reduction by 2030 creates policy alignment with the project.

Scalability & Strategic Context

Heineken operates in more than 70 countries with over 85,000 employees and a portfolio of more than 340 beers and ciders. Its global brewing and malting operations share the same continuous, high-temperature steam demand profile as Vialonga, meaning the HaaS structure developed here is directly replicable at any Heineken site served by an EDP-equivalent utility partner. If Vialonga demonstrates the expected reliability and economics, it provides Heineken with the operational data to mandate similar systems at further sites — and provides Rondo and EDP with a co-branded reference for selling the same service to other large European beverage, food, and chemical companies.