Tervetuloa! Find us in Hall E, stand 312
Energiamessut runs from 20 to 22 October at the Tampere Exhibition and Sports Centre, and Alex Alliston and Edward Kileff are on stand 312 in Hall E.
If you raise steam from gas, oil or peat and you're working out how to electrify it, come and talk to us. Email sales@caldera.co.uk to book a time before the show closes on Thursday.
The two things that usually stop a project
Sites looking at electrifying process heat tend to run into the same two problems, and neither of them is the boiler itself.
The first is capacity. A direct electric boiler draws its full rated power the moment the process asks for steam, so the connection behind it has to be sized for the site's worst hour. That usually means a connection upgrade, which tends to be the largest and slowest item in the whole project.
The second is price. Sites tend to need heat when everyone else needs power too, so electricity is often at its most expensive at exactly the moment you need steam. A site that can only buy energy when its process demands it has no way round that.
Why a Nordic grid makes this more interesting, not less
Finland has a high share of low-carbon generation and a day-ahead market with a real spread between its cheap and expensive hours. Wind output varies, demand peaks in the cold, and the gap between the best and worst hours of a day can be substantial.
A site can only benefit from that spread if it can choose when it buys.
We're describing the shape of the opportunity rather than putting a number on it, because what it's worth depends entirely on your own load and your own contract.
What a Storage Boiler changes
A Caldera Storage Boiler is an electric boiler with thermal storage and controls built in. Because charging and discharging are decoupled, the hour you buy electricity and the hour you deliver steam no longer have to be the same.
- You buy power when it's cheap rather than when the process needs heat.
- Your import is sized to your average load rather than your peak steam demand, so many sites can electrify within the connection they already have.
- Your peak import becomes a figure you choose.
- It delivers saturated steam at up to 16 barg (204°C), over 95% dry, with 94% round-trip efficiency and a discharge response of under 60 seconds.
- It integrates directly with your existing steam plant and runs alongside your current boilers, so you can turn an existing boiler down rather than switch it off.
It doesn't have to happen all at once
Each Heat Cell stores 5 MWh with 2 MWe of charging, and systems scale from 5 MWh to beyond 100 MWh. You can start with the share of your heat you can move, keep your existing plant as backup, and add capacity as the case builds.
That matters on a site with seasonal heat demand, because the first Heat Cell doesn't have to be sized for February.
Bring your load shape to the stand
Whether this works on your site depends on your load shape and your tariff, so we'll model it on your numbers. Send us twelve months of half-hourly demand data and we'll simulate a Storage Boiler across all 8,760 hours of a year against real price signals, then take you through the results.
Or find us in Hall E, stand 312, until Thursday.
About this analysis
The description of the Finnish power system (a high share of low-carbon generation, variable wind output, winter demand peaks and a meaningful day-ahead price spread) is a general characterisation. We haven't given a percentage, price or spread figure because we haven't sourced one for this article.
The product specifications are Caldera's published figures. Caldera's industrial-scale demonstrator at Fareham has met its targets every year since 2024.
