Find us at Genera, stand 9A10
Genera runs from 24 to 26 November at IFEMA Madrid, and we'll be on stand 9A10 for all three days.
If you raise steam from gas at a Spanish site and you're working out what electrifying it would really cost, come and talk to us. Email sales@caldera.co.uk to book a time, or just drop by.
What makes Spain different
Across most of Europe, the usual objection to electrifying heat is that power is priced off gas anyway, so you haven't really escaped anything.
In Spain that objection has lost more ground than almost anywhere else. Analysis published by Bruegel in April 2026, drawing on work by Ember, found that gas sets the Spanish power price in only 15% of hours, down from 75% in 2019. Italy, by comparison, sat at around 90%.
In practice, for most of the Spanish year electricity prices are set by something other than gas, usually solar and wind. Those are the cheap hours.
Cheap hours don't help if you can't buy in them
This is what decides whether any of it reaches your P&L.
A gas boiler buys fuel at the moment the process needs heat, and a direct electric boiler does exactly the same with electricity: it draws its full rated power the moment the process asks for steam. Either way, you buy when your process dictates, not when the market is cheap.
On a Spanish site that's particularly costly, because the gap between cheap and expensive hours is wide. Solar pushes midday prices down hard, and the evening ramp pushes them back up again. If your process can't shift, you can't capture any of that difference.
What storage changes
A Caldera Storage Boiler is an electric boiler with thermal storage and controls built in. Charging and discharging are decoupled, so you no longer have to buy electricity in the same hour you need the steam.
- You buy power when it's cheap rather than when the process needs heat. Charging is scheduled, and steam is there whenever the process calls for it.
- Your electrical import is sized to your average load rather than your peak steam demand, which lets many sites electrify within the grid connection they already have.
- You set your peak import, and the charges linked to it follow.
- 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 a gas boiler down rather than switch it off.
Which Spanish sites it suits
The size of the opportunity depends on how peaky your steam demand is and how much of your load you can shift.
Food and beverage sites are batch and shift-patterned, with predictable cycles that suit scheduled charging. Brewing and distilling have the highest peak-to-average ratio of any sector we work with, so the infrastructure saving is largest there.
Chemicals sites with continuous process heat below 400°C are a different kind of opportunity. There's less peak saving, but more to gain from price arbitrage, because a larger volume of energy is being shifted.
Agri-food sites are often rural, where grid constraints are tightest and sizing import to average rather than peak makes the biggest difference.
Phase it in rather than rebuild
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 to off-peak hours (often 20 to 40%), keep your existing boilers as backup, and add capacity as the case builds.
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 come and see us at Genera, stand 9A10, from 24 to 26 November.
About this analysis
The Spanish and Italian power price figures are from Keliauskaitė, U., B. McWilliams, T. Mramor, A. Roth, S. Tagliapietra and G. Zachmann (2026), 'How Europe should respond to the Iran gas shock – and how it shouldn't', Analysis 07/2026, Bruegel, drawing on Ember. They are the same figures used in our 5 October article on energy price exposure.
The product specifications are Caldera's published figures: saturated steam at up to 16 barg (204°C), over 95% dry, 94% round-trip efficiency, a discharge response of under 60 seconds, and Heat Cell modules of 5 MWh storage and 2 MWe charging, scaling from 5 MWh to beyond 100 MWh.
What we say about the Spanish daily price pattern (solar pushing midday prices down, the evening ramp pushing them up) is a general picture of a solar-heavy market rather than a figure for any particular year, which is why we haven't attached a euro value to it.
Caldera's industrial-scale demonstrator at Fareham has met its targets every year since 2024.
