Layer 6. Heat recovery
Who buys the heat, at what grade, under what contract? Waste heat has no value; contracted heat does. The difference is proximity to a demand, a grade the demand can use, and a contract that makes supply firm. Coral treats heat offtake as a commercial instrument rather than a sustainability claim.
The engineering question
Who buys the heat, at what grade, under what contract?
Waste heat has no value. Contracted heat does. The entire difference between the two is proximity to a demand, a grade the demand can use, and a contract that makes supply firm. Coral treats heat offtake as a productised commercial instrument rather than a sustainability claim, and designs the thermal path backwards from the offtaker.
Why the grade problem is solvable now and was not before
A previous-generation loop returning water at 30 C is thermally worthless to almost every offtaker. A current-generation loop returning at 55 C is directly usable for space heating, domestic hot water, swimming pools, horticulture and low-grade process heat, and is a viable heat pump source for industrial steam.
What Coral evaluated
Direct low-grade offtake into building and district heating systems. High-temperature heat pump upgrade to industrial steam grade. Natural-refrigerant heat pump and heat-to-power conversion at campus scale. Phase change thermal storage to make intermittent supply firm. And adsorption cooling driven by the waste heat itself.
What Coral decided
Build the commercial product, buy the equipment. A standard, financeable Coral heat supply agreement, a thermal buffer that makes supply firm regardless of GPU utilisation, and a financing structure under which the heat host contributes no capital. The technology for this exists in a dozen places. The productised commercial wrapper exists nowhere.
Coral weights proximity to a heat offtaker equally with power and connectivity when assessing a site. A pod sited next to a hospital, a leisure centre, a district heating network, a horticultural operation or an industrial process is a fundamentally better asset than a pod in an industrial park, and a materially easier planning application.
Where Coral is today, stated plainly
The shipping pods do not yet expose a standardised, metered heat offtake interface, and at a 25-35 C typical oil temperature the available heat grade would not be worth much if they did. Both are Gen 2 commitments, and they are the same commitment: the temperature strategy at Layer 4 is what makes the offtake interface at Layer 6 worth building.
What is still unsolved
How to price firm thermal supply from a load whose output follows GPU utilisation, and what buffer sizing makes a heat supply agreement bankable.
Where this appears in the pod
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