We have a heat storage system in our backyard, but it runs in reverse. We basically bought a large water blatter, cooled it during the night, and then used the coolness during the day.
Water is limited to 100C, so you need to scale up a lot and for some usage is not suitable because of low temp. Storing water at near-boiling point is difficult. It evaporates all the time, insulation gets wet, oxidation everywhere. While sand is much more manageable and maintenance free.
It has to be a stainless steel container that holds this water. For cooling won't do very good - you need a minimum delta 10 degrees C to cool the air, to have out coming air at 15 degrees C you will have a max temp of water of 5C. That's a very small amount of energy storage despite it's capacity. Anyway you will have to cool this mass down (sand or water) with something. For cooling it just won't work... Unless you use it to max the efficiency of a heat pump..
Here is more info on our setup if anyone is interested: The water bladder is 1000L and has some extra house insolation we had lying around, and it goes through a 5w pump that goes through a single small car transmission radiator with some quiet 140mm case fans. During the night, it goes into the window(it would be best if it were outside the window, but we are lazy), and during the day, the window closes. It's easy to make this change as the radiator is kind of on a hinge by the window. A good upgrade would be two radiators that switch automatically between day and night. Also, some night time small water drip system on an external radiator would be a nice upgrade, but then it will start wasting water (maybe a liter a day). This whole setup was just a toy with the benefit of keeping my son's room cool. It was mainly his creation.
@@FunWithBits sounds cool! Hehe (sorry the pun) be careful with water dripping on the radiator. It will accumulate minerals very quickly and corrosion will start pretty fast, no matter the material of the radiator
@@mariatorres9789 how can capacitors save industrial heat? Yes, we do have capacitor and batteries but they are very very expensive and that is why NEVs are expensive. Also it depends which part of the world one is living.
@mariatorres9789 you don't understand what you are talking about so you should refrain from talking with such arrogance. Capacitors store and release electrical energy. They are suitable only for very fast charging and discharging cycles. Where you need to empty all the stored energy immediately and constantly charge and discharge. Heating rocks with resisters stores electrical energy as thermal energy and the conversion efficiency is very high. It's capacity is due to its mass. Then you release it as thermal energy. Slow charge slow release. Charge when electricity is at cheap prices. Both are energy storage but completely different applications.
Recently there was an article about concrete energy storage. The concept is adding some stuff into the mixture and then the final product, let's say foundation of a building, could collect small amount of electricity for cubic meter. If it is a tall building the capacity could be enough to supply the households for a night.
Hopefully/probably the concrete will function with dual purpose: both as a structural material and a heat storage. Otherwise the concrete requires quite a lot of energy to be produced.
let's patch up a rough number here. A cubic of concrete weight around 2.4 tonnes, 2400kg Let's say we lift it up to 100 meters, lower than skyscraper's height generally Earth gravity would be 10m/s2 Stored energy would be mass multiplied by height multiplied by gravity's acceleration: 2400 x 100 x 10 = 2400000J. Two million and half joules. For comparison sake, the energy used to boil 1 kilogram of water is only 2 million joules Your concrete is only able to boil 1 kilogram of water
11:10 - 11:13 These rocks are more or less free. And have very, I would say "very minimal environmental impact." The autonomic itchy eye tick kind of caught my attention. These ideas are formidable. Loving the innovations!
Yeah - embarrassing. What I wanted to say was many rocks that can be purchased for a very low price have very minimal environmental impact. There are, of course, rocks that could have a very high environmental impact associated with their production, but those typically are not the ones that have a very low price. It should be noted that transport of the rocks is definitely not free and therefore it is important to find a local supply. For example, in the Faroe islands every construction project results in waste basalt that needs to be transported away and disposed of. In that case, there is arguably a positive environmental impact to use them for thermal storage, and the price of the rocks themselves is likely negative.
@@MrKengelbr Thank you. I was just curious. Europe & The Baltics seem to be really far ahead of what we are creating & installing here in Canada & the U.S. We do have the technology & installations. Yet, "Big Energy" still has the major hold on the markets overe here 😭
@@johnmahoney9354 True, but at the same time there are a lot of innovators in the area from the U.S.: Rondo, Antora and NASA even has a thermal battery program. So I'm still optimistic.
@@johnmahoney9354 It should be noted that the U.S. has Rondo, Malta, Antora Energy, and even NASA (plus others) working on thermal energy storage, but you're right that there are more projects in Europe. I think it comes down to many factors such as public funding for research, focus areas for venture capital and probably the fact that natural gas is much cheaper in the U.S. Much of the European electricity market is more transparent and makes more opportunity for buying cheap electricity and storing it as heat.
Finland 95% cloudy, cold and the sun disappears behind cloud for months has big ambitions for solar energy. Africa 95% sunshine, warm and the sun is always visible still lives in darkness. However, it is the mater of time and thanks to China Africa will be the center of Solar energy production forever.
What are you talking about???? Finland has big ambitions for renewables energy -> wood in this case They obviously have a lot of dams and other water related power plants. They produce 35% of electricity with nuclear, 18% hydroelectricity, 18% biomass/trash, 16% wind turbines, 10% thermo (oil/gas) AND 0.9% of everything else..... Which includes solar............. Stop spreading nonsense and actually look if what you think is actually true!!! Source : Wikipedia
Energy source of Finland 35% nuclear 18 hydro 18 biomass 16% wind 10% thermal 1% other (including solar) What are you talking about ? Just spreading nonsense when you could just search the real info.... Source : Wikipedia
I had a solar water heater. There were 3 panels on the roof collecting heat in tubes that was pumped down to a heat exchanger in a huge insulated tank. One sunny day would give us a couple days of hot water. It would take at least 4-5 days of cloud to bring the tank down to room temperature. There was a tankless water heater that could deal with variable temperatures. Sometimes it would have to mix cold in to bring the temperature down to a safe one
Interesting, I'd fancy one too. How often would the temperature drop below 55 C and for how long? This temperature is required to control for legionella pathogen.
@@johnransom1146 Why are you lying? We have those in Greece and a single person showering could deplete it. Also that works only in countries like ours with over 250 days of sun per year.
Imagine what pure salt could do instead of sand. One of the big issues with desalination plants is what to do with all the salt brine left behind. Salt batteries sound much better than sand batteries for thermal mass energy storage.
@@drillerdev4624 That's why the Finns aren't converting from heat to electricity, just using the heat for district heating at night. Not applicable everywhere, obviously. So sodium batteries are a more general solution.
it's nice to see a report about energy storage for once. It is the key to making wind and solar a reliable source of energy. We could build millions of windturbines, but it won't matter if we can't store the energy for the days where the wind doesn't blow.
Wind and solar isn't reliable and never will be. It relies on wind and sun, which as you can see aren't reliable and affordable least 12 hours of the day the sun isn't available at all, here that's even less. Stop spreading misinformation, it's dangerous.
The idea of reverse water storage is also great. They run the hydroelectricity in reverse, and when the sun goes down, it runs in the right direction.
Only reason I'm not a big fan of those is because of all the space it requires, and risk of pollution if it's not just water being used, some ideas I've seen use a mixture that is more efficient for this process. The most interesting to me are these big buoys that are underwater, or a deep tube on land, where you have a heavy weight that is pulled using the excess energy, at night that stored power is used to let out the weight and spin a generator. Much less space used and relatively simple! Thing is we needed a combination of all these "batteries" YESTERDAY! We need to move on this stuff much much faster.
Instead of pumping water upstream which is inefficient, just reduce the flow of water during the day and release more during the night when there's no solar power available. It's a lot more efficient.
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@@Jin88866 You are confusing 2 things here, a hydroelectric plant and a hydro battery. One is basically a river, the other one is a pool. A pool doesn't have a stream, you move the water from one place to another, the other one is a river with permanent stream which you can already control.
The video states that there is a shortage of sand. That is only true for the kind of sand used in the construction industry, sand that has to have sharp edges to lock together in concrete, or on a stable road base. But the sand needed in these 'sand batteries' don't need those properties. It could be beach sand, or sand from a desert. Those types of sand are unsuitable for construction, but there is certainly no shortage of them (Just ask any Egyptian).
Thermal storage makes absolute sense. Imagine if no fossil fuels needed to be used for domestic space heating at the very minimum... Combined with ultra insulation, whether vacuum panels in the silos or in homes, much higher standards of preventing heat loss or gain, it could be a game changer in the palliative care of our dying climate.
Seems like cooling is the problem and not heating. The US HVAC electricity consumption equals the entire African continent electric usage. Fossil fuels required to manufacture solo air panels and windmills, and then transport those to location. Fossil fuels required to mine the minerals for these projects. So many holes is this.
Interesting calculation: 1) The silo of 4 meter wide and 7 meter hight has 220 tons of sand (with perfect conditions, without insulations and any other equipment). Once heated to 600 celsius degrees it will store about 112 gigajoule of energy. 2) The swimming pool (mentioned in the video) of 25 meter long and presumably 15 meter wide and 1.5 meter deep will have 565 tons of water. It will need 2.4 gigajoule of energy to heat this water by 1 celsius degree. 3) Thus, in perfect conditions (there is no energy loss anywhere) this silo will allow to heat the water in the pool by 50 celsius degree for once. Or, imagine that it will be used to maintain the temperature of water. Suppose the water in the pool loose 1 celsius degree per 1 hour, the silo will allow to maintain the temperature in the pool for only 2 days, in perfect conditions (so, in real conditions it will be not more than 1 day). Not much!
9:27 good reporting on this tech. This is an important technology but not a silver bullet solution. The thermal round trip efficiency makes this tech attractive but renewables need to grow wildly in scale to use this tech for storing electricity. The round trip efficiency is so poor it’s just not viable. Smoothing out the demand for thermal energy like in district heat systems is a great use case.
Finland is northern and does not get enough sun-shine. Plus the population is low and the quality of life is high. People living in south asia gets lots of sun but energy cost is high and we do not need to heat our houses (we need to cool out houses with air-conditioners that are both expensive and inefficient).
The round trip efficency is in the high 90s. In Finland electricity is cheap in summer and expensive in winter. It makes sense in cold countries with a lot of renewables. We also have a large nuclear base load. Electrical energy converted to thermal energy via resisters into rocks is close to 100%. Then transferring this thermal energy through air pipes embedded in the rickvia a fan and air to water heat exchanger would be 90 something percent efficient. Also very cheap fixed costs relatively speaking
@@samuelandmarikaadams9837 this sounds like a great use case. Avoiding summer curtailment of renewables for winter heating. Too often I see reports that these batteries store summer electricity for winter electricity use. This is where the round trip efficiency is very low. I wish the US had more district heat like in the EU. They make a lot of sense.
2:10 That's one of the most important factors of these sand-batteries. That they use sand that is not suitable for other processes. This means you could use Sand Desert sand, for instance, to fill these batteries. If this takes off more, it would be interesting to see if sand exports from Sahara countries could become a thing. After all, Europe needs a gigantic amount of energy storage capacity and sourcing it from the biggest desert on the planet could be a viable way to procure it and offer countries like Algeria, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia alternative resource incomes.
The point about sand being scarce is really a conversation about cement specifically. It really isn't as big a problem globally as it might be in any unregulated market. Regardless any geotechnical engineer could source the right material within a half hour's trucking. Almost everywhere there is a landfill there is also a quarry/sandpit. Every battery type could be sourced locally with as much diversity as houses.
To be fair, the sand harvesting issues that are mentioned are only a problem with concrete sand, which is very finite due to the quality requirements. Normal rough sand that is used in the video is as really not an finite resource.. You can even just crush and grind rocks to make that kind of sand.
Video missed Graphite as a storage medium, I think it actually hits the highest temperatures, enough to cover ANY industrial need because Graphite can be hotter then the melting point of steel.
Yes, good point. And the one company working on this actually has a method to use the heat either for industrial heat or to create electricity . . . get this . . . by having high temperature solar panels INSIDE the box of graphite, since it glows white hot and gives off huge amounts of light energy. Still, primarily focused on providing stored heat, this one can also provide electricity for example for remote sites. Antora Energy I think is the company.
There was a story about waste heat from a computer farm used to heat public swimming pools. The large mass of water helped computers cool now efficiently and the pool for free heat.
Conclusion: If all the bread in the world could be baked using solar power, we could potentially reduce CO2 emissions by up to 100 million tonnes per year. This would have a huge environmental impact on the entire bread production process.
Its a shame they didn't research the new Danish thermal storage in Esbjerg. It's the first in the world on an MW scale and just opened the 25th of april. It can also take electricity and make it vack to electricity and is based on salt instead of sand. Once the one in Esbjerg is tested a bit. They will actually roll these out in all of Denmark, and i imagine other countries as well. I really enjoy these videos from DW, and they are very well made, so thanks for the videos. But please try and get the latest and best inventions out there 😅
First MW scale what? Did you mean GW? I don't understand your statement. There are many huge batteries out there using different technologies that are over a MW. From lithium ion, sand, compressed air, pumped hydro, and so many more. It is like the wild west. I think there is even a gravity battery plant that is over a MW now... Which is a scam cost wise per MW. Gravity Vault. Oh I think a myriad of Redox batteries have MW plants. Which show some of the biggest promise. One company says they can use salt water.
@dianapennepacker6854 it is the world's first MW MOSS(molten salt storage) that can take renewable electric energy, store it as heat, and turn it back to electricity, with minimal loss and long storage time. It's fully operational and not just a test facility. The next one will be GW. This is the last step before scaling up to GW. Yes, there are many other systems out there. They have different pros and cons. The pros here are the possibilities to scale up, which is an issue with some, and also the availability of the raw materials and the carbon footprint it takes to make it. Considering the amount we will need of these in the world, the prospect of scalability is probably its greatest strength. The same with the one in the video with sand. I haven't read about the redox batteries. That sounds interesting. Might have to refresh some chemistry first. It's been a while since I worked with redox reactions.
What is efficiency of this system? From solar panel to sand and from sand to house and buildings heating? How much of an energy can you store in such sand container? How much per 1kg of sand?
What if they used a heat pump, stored at a lower temp and had a larger storage mass. Would that take advantage of 300%-400% effieciency that heat pumps provide?
I heard about thermal energy storage years ago in applications like this one. But the thermal storage to replace a coal or gas powered steam generator is really amazing! If salt can be used as a medium, which is an obvious byproduct of desalination and a problem waste material, then it's a massive win win for energy storage. Take out the gas turbine, replace with a salt battery, everyone keeps their jobs, no new infrastructure, cheaper to run, easier to maintain, faster to bring online, no emissions. Even the right wingers can get behind that solution surely?
# 50% of the energy consumed in the world is thermal (heating or cooling).! # 40% of the high thermal energy needed for heavy manufacturing can be saved even by the current design of the sand battery! Despite the low relative storage energy temperature. The percentage numbers speak, and sand, stones, and salts are available in very large quantities. The storage process is carbon neutral and at a cost that is very competitive with other types of energy storage. If these data are correct, then all major Mega) aenergies will be stored in thermal batteries in the future. It is truly a significant development in the energy transition phase.
Data collection:World bread production:The annual world bread production is estimated to be approximately 100 million tons. Amount of energy required to bake bread:We assume that the amount of energy required to bake 1 kg of bread is approximately 2 kWh.
Congrats, you "discovered" the principle behind the terracotta stove which many east-european houses still use in rural areas today to heat their homes using firewood during winter. Not saying it's a bad idea but the half tone brick is exactly like a terracota stove, storing heat and gradually releasing it into the shorounding environment.
@@CrispyRichterthere is a heat solar plant based on molten salts made by a spanish company (like the tower shown in the miniature), but the plant has a lot of problems related to the sand. For starters, the salts need to constantly be hot enough so they never solidify
Errr... We have areas like SAHARA desert that has sand. The sand in Sahara (or in many other deserts) cannot be used for building, because it is too round due to its moving with the winds. But it can be used in sand batteries. There is PLENTY of sand that can be used in sand batteries, but not as building material. You may even store heat in water. If you have large enough storage, then few degrees more is enough for heating. You may even use natural water sources for this, like they have planned in Helsinki. And you may also use two- way geothermal wells for drawing heat in the winter and putting heat back during summer while getting cold water...
If you listened the video (or at school maybe) you would have understand that your comment is nonsense.... We use sand BECAUSE it has a many edges creating a very big heat exchange surface. So having a round sand from Sahara will be less efficient, need more energy and time to heat e5c
You can only generate work if there is a heat gradient. In a desert environment, the surrounding heat is also quite high, thus creating a much smaller heat gradient and limiting the amount of useful work you can extract. Sourcing raw material locally is ideal to reduce the carbon output associated with transportation cost.
@@boodebamboo And your statement is not sensical, but just trying to make a personal insult. As they said in video (finnish guy) they us sand that is not usable for construction... Sand has large surface area, because it is made of tiny particles. Having rough edges does not matter that much in this usage. It might even be beneficial to have small space between particles so coming/going heat can be transferred easier inside the mixture. (And yea, you need insulation...) If you use larger particles like rocks, then shape matters more. Also I bet that even sand cracks to even tinier rougher pieces under 600C heating/cooling cycle...
@@syjiang Yea, transportation is additional cost. But so is transferring oil/coal/gas for everyday burning and we do that way much more than is needed for sand batteries. And we are already transferring lots of sand around the world today... Mostly by barges. And even some sandy beaches has been sucked out of rough sand... Local ingredients are better ofc, but most often we simply do not have them. Global trade is mostly full of this transportation, and hardly anyone really complains about it. But we really should. Stop shipping between China/EU/USA?
Storing energy as heat doesn't make sense to me when we could use extra energy to create hydrogen through electrolysis and store it indefinitely. We could use that hydrogen in fuel cells or burn it to create energy. If we set up many hydrogen production plants in the Sahara Desert along the coast, we could take mirror type solar plants that focus light to heat salt that boils sea water turning it to steam that turns turbines. The steam would go through a distillery where it would cool down, turning back into water that would be used to make hydrogen, the waste salt could be used to create more power plants or shipped to be used in other industries. With it being a desert it is hot during the day and cold at night this would help to store the hydrogen, if we use a hydride substance we could avoid using energy to freeze the hydrogen and put more hydrogen into containers, with it being hot in the day the hydrogen would enter the hydride in containerships then at night the containers would cool trapping it and compressing the hydrogen. Then the ship could go anywhere in the world using fuel cell engines, heating the hydride would release the hydrogen into hydrogen power big rigs where it could be distributed around the country. With hydrogen being explosive there are dangers that we would have to look out for and accidents would be a hazard so it wouldn't be without risks. So hydrogen could either save us or destroyer us but with it being a clean and renewable fuel that can be stored for a vary long time I believe hydrogen is worth the risks.
Though you can convert 100% surplus electricity into heat but to convert stored heat back to electricity it is only max out at 50% from the most efficient steam turbine.
I saw something like that about month ago. Still cannot understand why the sand should be heated by electricity. Would not it be cheaper to heat the circulating water with the sun? A blackened panel would produce roughly ten times more heat than electricity from a solar panel...
The problem isnt getting energy from the sun more efficiently. If you want to heat water with the sun, concentrating sun's rays on water pipes with the help of parabolic mirrors is a great option. The problem is storing that energy for later, lets say night. Thats why we need to use sand or rocks, so we heat them during the day, to get that energy in the night when sun doesnt shine, or when wind isnt blowing.
@@MannVerma-px2ew This was exactly my point. You can connect the sand sylo to a solar water heater - a simple cheap device that can capture 90% of the heat of the sun at cost of few bucks per square meter (The numbers are assuming that the sylo is at 0% capacity). Compare that to 20% (I am being generous) of efficiency of solar panels at about $200 USD per square meter. A kilojoul of solar heater is hundreds time cheaper that one of solar panel. Well, this is a bit of the problem. The sylo works better if you store heat at higher temperature. E.g. if you heat the water (and the sand) to 90°C then it will hold about 10% more heat than if you heat to 50°C. Electricity has an advantage that you can heat the sand to hundreds Celsius, reducing costs on sylos. To achieve that with solar heating, you'd need concentrating mirrors. Not very practical. But there is another solution - heat pumps. Heat pumps are widely used exactly in such areas where you have a lot of low potential heat. A known proven solution. Also consider this: in sylo solutions the installed solar panels should work about 50% of the time to heat the sylos. You can replace half of those with cheap solar heaters and a heat pump of few percents of the costs and operate the heat pump from 1-2% of the solar panel's energy. You will even need fewer square meters because of better efficiency. IMO, the "solutions" advertised by the video was not created by engineers, but rather by the manufacturers of solar panels.
Finland is a wealthy country. The resources required to create this huge battery are immense. Fossil fuels are used to create and run the materials and machines required to create this magical battery. This is not a solution. This is not a panacea. This is not “renewable”.
Resistive heating is wasteful, given the fact that we have access to marvelous and mature heat pump technology to take advantage of. i.e.: water thermal battery is a far more efficient energy storage mechanism. In fact it's an energy amplifying system.
Heat pump are quite efficient in most cases but alas this is Finland and their lower environmental temperature reduces the efficiency gain out of the heat pump system. What do you mean exactly by "energy amplifying system?". Water can be a nice storage medium but some regions have limited access to water. Also there is an upper limit to how much heat you can put in as water transition to steam and one would need a pressure vessel to contain it, increasing complexity and cost.
@@syjiang When it comes to heat pump(or refrigeration plant) efficiency in the normal sense isn't quite accurate. Standard reference is COP, which describes heat pump's effectiveness in moving heat. In this case, resistive heating only allows for 100% heating for a given unit of electric power input, not so with heat pump - it moves a lot more than the 100 percent electric power input. That's what I meant by 'energy amplifying'. For the present discussion, i.e.: winter heating, heat energy can be stored at say 80 or 90 degree C, and when needed, the stored hot water can be 1. circulated as is to meet heating needs or 2. serve as input to heat pump and the outlet temperature is then raised to say 120 C and then circulated for heating instead. The low temperature jump from 90 C to 120 C allows for COP of about 4 to 5, which is a big gain. The slightly cooler water from the heat pump inlet is then recirculated back to storage tank. 'Setback' for such a system is the need for hot water pool or tank to store water at 80 or 90 C, but this can be sited underground.
@@aryaman05 That has been proven to have diminished results and not a practical option. In practice, the higher the draft to spin the fan, the more the draft is blocked.
CO2 reduction when baking with solar power: To simplify the calculation and to make noise correction assumptions, we will assume that all production equipment manufacturing and construction involves CO2 emissions, so the total is zero. In that case, solar power generation has almost no CO2 emissions, so we will assume that it can reduce the above 100 million tons of CO2 emissions.
30% energy loss is serious. They also don't mention the cost and maintenance of the installation to turn electricity into heat and, more importantly, to turn heat into electricity. Still nice to see they are working on these problems!
The real unlock for me will be when these are coupled with heat pumps rather than resistive heaters. I was even reading about PV-T panels that can prolong PV life and produce heat too! Upgrade that heat with heat pumps and store heating energy as heat.
Leave the salt left over from desalination to build batteries. That could be a win-win. You would get salt for energy storage and water for any number of uses.
What if they connected it to a heat pump that cooled the air inside a building and raise the temperature inside the sand battery. Use energy that would have been wasted and store it
Sand or clay heat storage has been used for thousands of years (just look at masonry stoves/fireplaces), there is nothing new about that. When used as a heat storage the system is extremely useful, low cost, low maintenance and such economically very efficient. The issue is when this heat batteries are charged with from low density energy sources like solar-electric or wind. If charged with a DIRECT (concentrated) sunlight this make considerably more sense as, the direct sunlight is 4-4.5x times more efficient then solar-electric for a heat charging. When these heat batteries are viewed as SOURCE of electric power though, the efficiency of the entire system goes down in addition at least another 60% and it becomes extremely costly per KWh.
I don't think you understood correctly, the term "battery" being misleading. This involves converting intermittent electricity that is difficult and expensive to store into heat that can be used for industrial uses. There is no plan to subsequently return the heat in the form of electricity. This is a solution that concerns few people: only industrialists using heat. Germany's European anti-nuclear policy was harmful for this type of technology: subsidies were first allocated to anti-nuclear companies, penalizing the rest.
Sounds great, but not in my solar system. If you could do it over at proxima centauri and beam the power over so we can enjoy the electricity without having to deal with the pollution locally, then we'll be just fine.
@@brainletmong6302 What pollution? Nuclear energy has the least pollution than of any energy source. And less radioactivity than any other energy source.
Early stage (up to 5 years): Adoption of new technologies takes time, so adoption is expected to be low (e.g., less than 5%). Mid-term stage (up to 10 years): As technologies mature and costs fall, adoption may increase (e.g., around 20%). Long-term stage (up to 20 years): With improved policy support and infrastructure, adoption may increase (e.g., 50% or more).
If you put an iron scouring pad in a pyrex tube filled with water,the sun will keep boiling water because 0 heat can escape pyrex tubes.if someone can invent a more efficient conductor of sun heat,there will be a new very high efficiency battery storage combination that no one has realised yet.
Time for EU countries to invest in these technologies. Very nice report BUT I am missing the comparison with the elephant in the room the Lithium Ion industrial battery packs. I hope that Rondo brick is cheaper and lasts longer...
@@thegreatdane3627 Those TESLA grid batteries is what IS being sold right now. The market thinks this is worth putting their money in. New technologies like this thermal battery have yet to prove themselves. Therefore I would like to know the price comparison at volume.
@@ocker2000 i don't think it is going to be just one type of storage in the future. Lithium batteries could be used for short term storage, with enough capacity for 1 or 2 days. That would make it much easier to manage the grid. Thermal batteries, pumped hydro and maybe even hydrogen could be used for long term storage. Lithium batteries will most likely be replaced by sodium-ion batteries in the near future, at least for stationary storage. I don't think we are gonna see sodium-ion batteries in mobile phones anytime soon.
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Thermal batteries do not require rare earth minerals, which are hard to find and disruptive to environment, and also have longer lifecycles
This gives me a glimpse of hope for mankind. But I'm afraid this technology is too late at least 20-30 years. I mean it doesn't seem to be a particularly difficult technology to master, like fission power plants. And still nobody even bothered to give it a try a few decades ago.
Because it was not necessary obviously. Fossil fuels and nuclear power don't need energy storage as they can generate energy on demand. Renewables cannot.
@@David-bi6lf Obviously you didn't get the point I made. It was very well known 20-30 years ago that both fossil fuels and nuclear power are neither safe to operate nor sustainable in the long-term. Therefore there has been a demand for energy storage long time ago already. Simply because we [mankind] knew that our current energy supply is built on a non-sustainable basis. We are reacting on this issue way too late and maybe it is already too late... who knows.
@@Brainsucker92 There was no renewable energy to store 20-30 years ago. It was absolutely reasonable to focus on electrictiy generation first. And we did so quite succesfully. The fact that we can generate cheep electritiy from renewables today is the result of incredible innovations that took place in the last decades. The "no one bothered", "we did nothing" rhetoric somehow seems to assume that these innovations just fell out of the sky. Btw. to this date, nuclear is actually (by far) the safest form on electricity generation.
@@fs3859 No need to respond to your post in depth. It is oozing with wrong information from start to finish. If you want to take part in a discussion, please consider using facts instead.
Storing energy as heat doesn't make sense to me when we could use extra energy to create hydrogen through electrolysis and store it indefinitely. We could use that hydrogen in fuel cells or burn it to create energy. If we set up many hydrogen production plants in the Sahara Desert along the coast, we could take mirror type solar plants that focus light to heat salt to boil sea water turning it to steam that turns turbines. The steam would go through a distillery where it would cool down, turning back into water that would be used to make hydrogen, the waste salt could be used to create more power plants or shipped to be used in other industries. With it being a desert it is hot during the day and cold at night this would help to store the hydrogen, if we use a hydride we could avoid using energy to freeze the hydrogen and put more hydrogen into containers, with it being hot in the day the hydrogen would enter the hydride in containerships then at night the containers would cool trapping it and compressing the hydrogen. Then the ship could go anywhere in the world using fuel cell engines heating the hydride would release the hydrogen into hydrogen power big rigs where it could be distributed around the country. With hydrogen being explosive there are dangers that we would have to look out for and accidents would be a danger so it wouldn't be without risks. So hydrogen will either save us or destroyer us but with it being a clean and renewable fuel I believe hydrogen is worth the risks.
While I agree hydrogen can be generated from excess electricity, storing it is way more difficult than you make it out to be. If it leaks away it's like heat loss.
@@Sekir80 You may want to look into hydride it is a safer way to store hydrogen and you can actually store more hydrogen in a smaller space than you get if you liquify the hydrogen.
Generating electricity using photovoltaics only to convert it resistively into heat is a horribly inefficient way of using energy. A much better way would be to convert sunlight directly into heat using lenses etc to directly 'charge' the thermal battery.
It might be better but is more complex the good Thing is it can be "Charged" with many types of thermal energy. One simple choice is electric heater, A hot air blower or using waste heat from processes or AC
Heat pumps are efficient when temperature gradient is low, like the difference between the inside and outside of your house. If you're heating something to 600°C it's better to use resistive heat.
Most of the Science described in these reports goes back decades. The technologies have existed much longer... The issue here is not about Technology. It is not even about Science. It is about Politics and Economics. Only after the perceptions of people and the finances of government and industry are satisfied can we get to developing that what we already know.
Its only product/marketing point of view. Where are some analytics and profs its cost efficiency (not from the company itself)? A lot of this system requires a lot of time to get money back
I like how northern European wear uniforms, even where it's absolutely unnecessary. It shows how they are serious. Maybe it's because they have Viking blood in them.
"We're entering an era when the sustainability officer and the financial officer can love each other" 😂😂 succinctly put
We have a heat storage system in our backyard, but it runs in reverse. We basically bought a large water blatter, cooled it during the night, and then used the coolness during the day.
With a two-tank system you could heat up your water for showers, kitchen and laundry.
Water is limited to 100C, so you need to scale up a lot and for some usage is not suitable because of low temp. Storing water at near-boiling point is difficult. It evaporates all the time, insulation gets wet, oxidation everywhere. While sand is much more manageable and maintenance free.
It has to be a stainless steel container that holds this water. For cooling won't do very good - you need a minimum delta 10 degrees C to cool the air, to have out coming air at 15 degrees C you will have a max temp of water of 5C. That's a very small amount of energy storage despite it's capacity. Anyway you will have to cool this mass down (sand or water) with something. For cooling it just won't work... Unless you use it to max the efficiency of a heat pump..
Here is more info on our setup if anyone is interested: The water bladder is 1000L and has some extra house insolation we had lying around, and it goes through a 5w pump that goes through a single small car transmission radiator with some quiet 140mm case fans. During the night, it goes into the window(it would be best if it were outside the window, but we are lazy), and during the day, the window closes. It's easy to make this change as the radiator is kind of on a hinge by the window. A good upgrade would be two radiators that switch automatically between day and night. Also, some night time small water drip system on an external radiator would be a nice upgrade, but then it will start wasting water (maybe a liter a day). This whole setup was just a toy with the benefit of keeping my son's room cool. It was mainly his creation.
@@FunWithBits sounds cool! Hehe (sorry the pun) be careful with water dripping on the radiator. It will accumulate minerals very quickly and corrosion will start pretty fast, no matter the material of the radiator
This is the kind of innovations we want in this era.
We already have capacitors. They're still creating the energy in a different way. This isn't new or better technology. It's useless.
@@mariatorres9789 Methinks, you might be missing the joke.
@@mariatorres9789 how can capacitors save industrial heat? Yes, we do have capacitor and batteries but they are very very expensive and that is why NEVs are expensive. Also it depends which part of the world one is living.
@mariatorres9789 you don't understand what you are talking about so you should refrain from talking with such arrogance. Capacitors store and release electrical energy. They are suitable only for very fast charging and discharging cycles. Where you need to empty all the stored energy immediately and constantly charge and discharge.
Heating rocks with resisters stores electrical energy as thermal energy and the conversion efficiency is very high. It's capacity is due to its mass. Then you release it as thermal energy. Slow charge slow release. Charge when electricity is at cheap prices.
Both are energy storage but completely different applications.
@@samuelandmarikaadams9837 your last paragraph is my focus. We need several means of power storage systems and innovative systems are always welcome.
Recently there was an article about concrete energy storage. The concept is adding some stuff into the mixture and then the final product, let's say foundation of a building, could collect small amount of electricity for cubic meter.
If it is a tall building the capacity could be enough to supply the households for a night.
Hopefully/probably the concrete will function with dual purpose: both as a structural material and a heat storage. Otherwise the concrete requires quite a lot of energy to be produced.
let's patch up a rough number here.
A cubic of concrete weight around 2.4 tonnes, 2400kg
Let's say we lift it up to 100 meters, lower than skyscraper's height generally
Earth gravity would be 10m/s2
Stored energy would be mass multiplied by height multiplied by gravity's acceleration: 2400 x 100 x 10 = 2400000J. Two million and half joules.
For comparison sake, the energy used to boil 1 kilogram of water is only 2 million joules
Your concrete is only able to boil 1 kilogram of water
There are a lot of BS studies looking for funding $$.
@@ZETA14.88 >let's patch up a rough number here.
You can't distinguish potential energy from termal? Why not use mc2 then? 😂
11:10 - 11:13 These rocks are more or less free. And have very, I would say "very minimal environmental impact." The autonomic itchy eye tick kind of caught my attention. These ideas are formidable. Loving the innovations!
Yeah - embarrassing. What I wanted to say was many rocks that can be purchased for a very low price have very minimal environmental impact. There are, of course, rocks that could have a very high environmental impact associated with their production, but those typically are not the ones that have a very low price. It should be noted that transport of the rocks is definitely not free and therefore it is important to find a local supply. For example, in the Faroe islands every construction project results in waste basalt that needs to be transported away and disposed of. In that case, there is arguably a positive environmental impact to use them for thermal storage, and the price of the rocks themselves is likely negative.
@@MrKengelbr Thank you. I was just curious. Europe & The Baltics seem to be really far ahead of what we are creating & installing here in Canada & the U.S. We do have the technology & installations. Yet, "Big Energy" still has the major hold on the markets overe here 😭
@@johnmahoney9354 True, but at the same time there are a lot of innovators in the area from the U.S.: Rondo, Antora and NASA even has a thermal battery program. So I'm still optimistic.
@@johnmahoney9354 It should be noted that the U.S. has Rondo, Malta, Antora Energy, and even NASA (plus others) working on thermal energy storage, but you're right that there are more projects in Europe. I think it comes down to many factors such as public funding for research, focus areas for venture capital and probably the fact that natural gas is much cheaper in the U.S. Much of the European electricity market is more transparent and makes more opportunity for buying cheap electricity and storing it as heat.
Imagine what could be done to save the planet and people if the money put into weapons was put into this type of technology.
A lot could be done. And then Putin or another terrorist will come and take it away for stupidest reasons.
This is why I love TH-cam.
In Canada, the use the sand battery to store the heat when the summer, and uses the heat to warming up the building when winter
What a great balanced and hopeful story.
Except what she said at 2:00 was laughably incorrect.
Finland 95% cloudy, cold and the sun disappears behind cloud for months has big ambitions for solar energy. Africa 95% sunshine, warm and the sun is always visible still lives in darkness. However, it is the mater of time and thanks to China Africa will be the center of Solar energy production forever.
What are you talking about???? Finland has big ambitions for renewables energy -> wood in this case
They obviously have a lot of dams and other water related power plants.
They produce 35% of electricity with nuclear, 18% hydroelectricity, 18% biomass/trash, 16% wind turbines, 10% thermo (oil/gas)
AND 0.9% of everything else..... Which includes solar.............
Stop spreading nonsense and actually look if what you think is actually true!!!
Source : Wikipedia
Think outside the box, geothermal 😅
@@matthew3136oh please, like the world will ever leave African resources 😅
Energy source of Finland
35% nuclear
18 hydro
18 biomass
16% wind
10% thermal
1% other (including solar)
What are you talking about ? Just spreading nonsense when you could just search the real info....
Source : Wikipedia
I don't remember the video said Finland was storing solar energy in sand or rocks.
Maybe you saw something I didn't???
I had a solar water heater. There were 3 panels on the roof collecting heat in tubes that was pumped down to a heat exchanger in a huge insulated tank. One sunny day would give us a couple days of hot water. It would take at least 4-5 days of cloud to bring the tank down to room temperature. There was a tankless water heater that could deal with variable temperatures. Sometimes it would have to mix cold in to bring the temperature down to a safe one
Interesting, I'd fancy one too. How often would the temperature drop below 55 C and for how long? This temperature is required to control for legionella pathogen.
On a sunny day.
That's the catch.
In cold months when you want the heat, that's when you don't have the generation.
@@robertsaca3512 did you miss the storage tank thing?
@@Hukkinen no idea
@@johnransom1146 Why are you lying? We have those in Greece and a single person showering could deplete it. Also that works only in countries like ours with over 250 days of sun per year.
Imagine what pure salt could do instead of sand. One of the big issues with desalination plants is what to do with all the salt brine left behind. Salt batteries sound much better than sand batteries for thermal mass energy storage.
The corrosion problem makes that impractical.
Sodium electrical batteries
Heat batteries have a bad conversion rate from heat back to electricity
@@drillerdev4624 That's why the Finns aren't converting from heat to electricity, just using the heat for district heating at night. Not applicable everywhere, obviously. So sodium batteries are a more general solution.
@@concinnus didn't want to imply they were, sorry if it came out confusing.
Just wanted to point out why heat storage isn't a general solution.
@@drillerdev4624 it is if you replace a gas or coal fire in an existing turbine driven power station
it's nice to see a report about energy storage for once. It is the key to making wind and solar a reliable source of energy. We could build millions of windturbines, but it won't matter if we can't store the energy for the days where the wind doesn't blow.
Wind and solar isn't reliable and never will be.
It relies on wind and sun, which as you can see aren't reliable and affordable least 12 hours of the day the sun isn't available at all, here that's even less.
Stop spreading misinformation, it's dangerous.
The idea of reverse water storage is also great. They run the hydroelectricity in reverse, and when the sun goes down, it runs in the right direction.
Issue is actually suitable places for this
Only reason I'm not a big fan of those is because of all the space it requires, and risk of pollution if it's not just water being used, some ideas I've seen use a mixture that is more efficient for this process.
The most interesting to me are these big buoys that are underwater, or a deep tube on land, where you have a heavy weight that is pulled using the excess energy, at night that stored power is used to let out the weight and spin a generator. Much less space used and relatively simple! Thing is we needed a combination of all these "batteries" YESTERDAY! We need to move on this stuff much much faster.
Instead of pumping water upstream which is inefficient, just reduce the flow of water during the day and release more during the night when there's no solar power available. It's a lot more efficient.
@@Jin88866 You are confusing 2 things here, a hydroelectric plant and a hydro battery.
One is basically a river, the other one is a pool. A pool doesn't have a stream, you move the water from one place to another, the other one is a river with permanent stream which you can already control.
The video states that there is a shortage of sand. That is only true for the kind of sand used in the construction industry, sand that has to have sharp edges to lock together in concrete, or on a stable road base. But the sand needed in these 'sand batteries' don't need those properties. It could be beach sand, or sand from a desert. Those types of sand are unsuitable for construction, but there is certainly no shortage of them (Just ask any Egyptian).
Thermal storage makes absolute sense. Imagine if no fossil fuels needed to be used for domestic space heating at the very minimum... Combined with ultra insulation, whether vacuum panels in the silos or in homes, much higher standards of preventing heat loss or gain, it could be a game changer in the palliative care of our dying climate.
Actually, the climate has always been changing.
That's what it does.
Seems like cooling is the problem and not heating. The US HVAC electricity consumption equals the entire African continent electric usage. Fossil fuels required to manufacture solo air panels and windmills, and then transport those to location. Fossil fuels required to mine the minerals for these projects. So many holes is this.
Interesting calculation:
1) The silo of 4 meter wide and 7 meter hight has 220 tons of sand (with perfect conditions, without insulations and any other equipment). Once heated to 600 celsius degrees it will store about 112 gigajoule of energy.
2) The swimming pool (mentioned in the video) of 25 meter long and presumably 15 meter wide and 1.5 meter deep will have 565 tons of water. It will need 2.4 gigajoule of energy to heat this water by 1 celsius degree.
3) Thus, in perfect conditions (there is no energy loss anywhere) this silo will allow to heat the water in the pool by 50 celsius degree for once. Or, imagine that it will be used to maintain the temperature of water. Suppose the water in the pool loose 1 celsius degree per 1 hour, the silo will allow to maintain the temperature in the pool for only 2 days, in perfect conditions (so, in real conditions it will be not more than 1 day). Not much!
9:27 good reporting on this tech. This is an important technology but not a silver bullet solution. The thermal round trip efficiency makes this tech attractive but renewables need to grow wildly in scale to use this tech for storing electricity. The round trip efficiency is so poor it’s just not viable. Smoothing out the demand for thermal energy like in district heat systems is a great use case.
Finland is northern and does not get enough sun-shine. Plus the population is low and the quality of life is high. People living in south asia gets lots of sun but energy cost is high and we do not need to heat our houses (we need to cool out houses with air-conditioners that are both expensive and inefficient).
@@janami-dharmam Geothermal Tech is best for this issue
The round trip efficency is in the high 90s. In Finland electricity is cheap in summer and expensive in winter. It makes sense in cold countries with a lot of renewables. We also have a large nuclear base load.
Electrical energy converted to thermal energy via resisters into rocks is close to 100%. Then transferring this thermal energy through air pipes embedded in the rickvia a fan and air to water heat exchanger would be 90 something percent efficient. Also very cheap fixed costs relatively speaking
@@samuelandmarikaadams9837 He was talking about electrical round-trip efficiency being low, making it not viable storage for most places.
@@samuelandmarikaadams9837 this sounds like a great use case. Avoiding summer curtailment of renewables for winter heating. Too often I see reports that these batteries store summer electricity for winter electricity use. This is where the round trip efficiency is very low. I wish the US had more district heat like in the EU. They make a lot of sense.
2:10 That's one of the most important factors of these sand-batteries. That they use sand that is not suitable for other processes. This means you could use Sand Desert sand, for instance, to fill these batteries. If this takes off more, it would be interesting to see if sand exports from Sahara countries could become a thing. After all, Europe needs a gigantic amount of energy storage capacity and sourcing it from the biggest desert on the planet could be a viable way to procure it and offer countries like Algeria, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia alternative resource incomes.
The point about sand being scarce is really a conversation about cement specifically. It really isn't as big a problem globally as it might be in any unregulated market. Regardless any geotechnical engineer could source the right material within a half hour's trucking. Almost everywhere there is a landfill there is also a quarry/sandpit. Every battery type could be sourced locally with as much diversity as houses.
To be fair, the sand harvesting issues that are mentioned are only a problem with concrete sand, which is very finite due to the quality requirements. Normal rough sand that is used in the video is as really not an finite resource.. You can even just crush and grind rocks to make that kind of sand.
Video missed Graphite as a storage medium, I think it actually hits the highest temperatures, enough to cover ANY industrial need because Graphite can be hotter then the melting point of steel.
Really.
Graphite
Yes, good point. And the one company working on this actually has a method to use the heat either for industrial heat or to create electricity . . . get this . . . by having high temperature solar panels INSIDE the box of graphite, since it glows white hot and gives off huge amounts of light energy. Still, primarily focused on providing stored heat, this one can also provide electricity for example for remote sites. Antora Energy I think is the company.
In-floor radiant heat is a very accepted, proven solution. The simplicity is a winner.
There was a story about waste heat from a computer farm used to heat public swimming pools. The large mass of water helped computers cool now efficiently and the pool for free heat.
Salt heat batteries are interesting ,but humidity batteries are genius,thanks for this educational documentary,encouraging future
This is just AMAZING 😍
Could the leftover cement from demolish buildings or the waste after burning trash for electricity be used as energy storage medium?
Conclusion: If all the bread in the world could be baked using solar power, we could potentially reduce CO2 emissions by up to 100 million tonnes per year. This would have a huge environmental impact on the entire bread production process.
Its a shame they didn't research the new Danish thermal storage in Esbjerg.
It's the first in the world on an MW scale and just opened the 25th of april.
It can also take electricity and make it vack to electricity and is based on salt instead of sand.
Once the one in Esbjerg is tested a bit. They will actually roll these out in all of Denmark, and i imagine other countries as well.
I really enjoy these videos from DW, and they are very well made, so thanks for the videos.
But please try and get the latest and best inventions out there 😅
First MW scale what? Did you mean GW?
I don't understand your statement. There are many huge batteries out there using different technologies that are over a MW.
From lithium ion, sand, compressed air, pumped hydro, and so many more. It is like the wild west.
I think there is even a gravity battery plant that is over a MW now... Which is a scam cost wise per MW. Gravity Vault.
Oh I think a myriad of Redox batteries have MW plants. Which show some of the biggest promise. One company says they can use salt water.
that is good news 👍
@dianapennepacker6854 it is the world's first MW MOSS(molten salt storage) that can take renewable electric energy, store it as heat, and turn it back to electricity, with minimal loss and long storage time.
It's fully operational and not just a test facility.
The next one will be GW. This is the last step before scaling up to GW.
Yes, there are many other systems out there. They have different pros and cons.
The pros here are the possibilities to scale up, which is an issue with some, and also the availability of the raw materials and the carbon footprint it takes to make it.
Considering the amount we will need of these in the world, the prospect of scalability is probably its greatest strength. The same with the one in the video with sand.
I haven't read about the redox batteries. That sounds interesting.
Might have to refresh some chemistry first. It's been a while since I worked with redox reactions.
MW? YEAH SURE
@@Suomen_Enkeli look it up
Thank you fot this video
This is one of my favourite storage solutions and the only real damger is it's hot, but will never explode.
What is efficiency of this system? From solar panel to sand and from sand to house and buildings heating? How much of an energy can you store in such sand container? How much per 1kg of sand?
Why this sand tank is above the ground, not under?
Especially in Finland.
I love the thermal bricks, they are so cool!
This is very Helpful .. Very innovative .. Safe energy resource
ask sahara is low grade sand is a finite ressource
What if they used a heat pump, stored at a lower temp and had a larger storage mass. Would that take advantage of 300%-400% effieciency that heat pumps provide?
You're right. Some companies are working in this direction. And I have several ideas in this area
I heard about thermal energy storage years ago in applications like this one. But the thermal storage to replace a coal or gas powered steam generator is really amazing! If salt can be used as a medium, which is an obvious byproduct of desalination and a problem waste material, then it's a massive win win for energy storage. Take out the gas turbine, replace with a salt battery, everyone keeps their jobs, no new infrastructure, cheaper to run, easier to maintain, faster to bring online, no emissions. Even the right wingers can get behind that solution surely?
# 50% of the energy consumed in the world is thermal (heating or cooling).!
# 40% of the high thermal energy needed for heavy manufacturing can be saved even by the current design of the sand battery! Despite the low relative storage energy temperature.
The percentage numbers speak, and sand, stones, and salts are available in very large quantities.
The storage process is carbon neutral and at a cost that is very competitive with other types of energy storage.
If these data are correct, then all major Mega) aenergies will be stored in thermal batteries in the future. It is truly a significant development in the energy transition phase.
Data collection:World bread production:The annual world bread production is estimated to be approximately 100 million tons.
Amount of energy required to bake bread:We assume that the amount of energy required to bake 1 kg of bread is approximately 2 kWh.
Congrats, you "discovered" the principle behind the terracotta stove which many east-european houses still use in rural areas today to heat their homes using firewood during winter.
Not saying it's a bad idea but the half tone brick is exactly like a terracota stove, storing heat and gradually releasing it into the shorounding environment.
Good report, good idea all around.
Is it feasible to create liquid batteries? By perhaps using plasma or superfluids in a tank and cooling turbine system?
There are silimar liquid salt heat storages.
@@CrispyRichterthere is a heat solar plant based on molten salts made by a spanish company (like the tower shown in the miniature), but the plant has a lot of problems related to the sand. For starters, the salts need to constantly be hot enough so they never solidify
Isn't using spare peak production to electrolyze water into hydrogen that is pressurized and liquefied enough?
Awesome!
New use for powdered glass from recycling plants?
Errr... We have areas like SAHARA desert that has sand. The sand in Sahara (or in many other deserts) cannot be used for building, because it is too round due to its moving with the winds. But it can be used in sand batteries. There is PLENTY of sand that can be used in sand batteries, but not as building material.
You may even store heat in water. If you have large enough storage, then few degrees more is enough for heating. You may even use natural water sources for this, like they have planned in Helsinki.
And you may also use two- way geothermal wells for drawing heat in the winter and putting heat back during summer while getting cold water...
If you listened the video (or at school maybe) you would have understand that your comment is nonsense....
We use sand BECAUSE it has a many edges creating a very big heat exchange surface. So having a round sand from Sahara will be less efficient, need more energy and time to heat e5c
You can only generate work if there is a heat gradient. In a desert environment, the surrounding heat is also quite high, thus creating a much smaller heat gradient and limiting the amount of useful work you can extract. Sourcing raw material locally is ideal to reduce the carbon output associated with transportation cost.
@@boodebamboo And your statement is not sensical, but just trying to make a personal insult.
As they said in video (finnish guy) they us sand that is not usable for construction...
Sand has large surface area, because it is made of tiny particles. Having rough edges does not matter that much in this usage. It might even be beneficial to have small space between particles so coming/going heat can be transferred easier inside the mixture. (And yea, you need insulation...)
If you use larger particles like rocks, then shape matters more.
Also I bet that even sand cracks to even tinier rougher pieces under 600C heating/cooling cycle...
@@syjiang Yea, transportation is additional cost. But so is transferring oil/coal/gas for everyday burning and we do that way much more than is needed for sand batteries.
And we are already transferring lots of sand around the world today... Mostly by barges. And even some sandy beaches has been sucked out of rough sand...
Local ingredients are better ofc, but most often we simply do not have them. Global trade is mostly full of this transportation, and hardly anyone really complains about it. But we really should.
Stop shipping between China/EU/USA?
Storing energy as heat doesn't make sense to me when we could use extra energy to create hydrogen through electrolysis and store it indefinitely.
We could use that hydrogen in fuel cells or burn it to create energy.
If we set up many hydrogen production plants in the Sahara Desert along the coast, we could take mirror type solar plants that focus light to heat salt that boils sea water turning it to steam that turns turbines.
The steam would go through a distillery where it would cool down, turning back into water that would be used to make hydrogen, the waste salt could be used to create more power plants or shipped to be used in other industries.
With it being a desert it is hot during the day and cold at night this would help to store the hydrogen, if we use a hydride substance we could avoid using energy to freeze the hydrogen and put more hydrogen into containers, with it being hot in the day the hydrogen would enter the hydride in containerships then at night the containers would cool trapping it and compressing the hydrogen.
Then the ship could go anywhere in the world using fuel cell engines, heating the hydride would release the hydrogen into hydrogen power big rigs where it could be distributed around the country.
With hydrogen being explosive there are dangers that we would have to look out for and accidents would be a hazard so it wouldn't be without risks.
So hydrogen could either save us or destroyer us but with it being a clean and renewable fuel that can be stored for a vary long time I believe hydrogen is worth the risks.
Though you can convert 100% surplus electricity into heat but to convert stored heat back to electricity it is only max out at 50% from the most efficient steam turbine.
I saw something like that about month ago. Still cannot understand why the sand should be heated by electricity. Would not it be cheaper to heat the circulating water with the sun? A blackened panel would produce roughly ten times more heat than electricity from a solar panel...
The problem isnt getting energy from the sun more efficiently. If you want to heat water with the sun, concentrating sun's rays on water pipes with the help of parabolic mirrors is a great option. The problem is storing that energy for later, lets say night. Thats why we need to use sand or rocks, so we heat them during the day, to get that energy in the night when sun doesnt shine, or when wind isnt blowing.
@@MannVerma-px2ew
This was exactly my point.
You can connect the sand sylo to a solar water heater - a simple cheap device that can capture 90% of the heat of the sun at cost of few bucks per square meter (The numbers are assuming that the sylo is at 0% capacity).
Compare that to 20% (I am being generous) of efficiency of solar panels at about $200 USD per square meter. A kilojoul of solar heater is hundreds time cheaper that one of solar panel.
Well, this is a bit of the problem. The sylo works better if you store heat at higher temperature. E.g. if you heat the water (and the sand) to 90°C then it will hold about 10% more heat than if you heat to 50°C. Electricity has an advantage that you can heat the sand to hundreds Celsius, reducing costs on sylos. To achieve that with solar heating, you'd need concentrating mirrors. Not very practical. But there is another solution - heat pumps. Heat pumps are widely used exactly in such areas where you have a lot of low potential heat. A known proven solution.
Also consider this: in sylo solutions the installed solar panels should work about 50% of the time to heat the sylos. You can replace half of those with cheap solar heaters and a heat pump of few percents of the costs and operate the heat pump from 1-2% of the solar panel's energy. You will even need fewer square meters because of better efficiency.
IMO, the "solutions" advertised by the video was not created by engineers, but rather by the manufacturers of solar panels.
Finland is a wealthy country. The resources required to create this huge battery are immense. Fossil fuels are used to create and run the materials and machines required to create this magical battery. This is not a solution. This is not a panacea. This is not “renewable”.
Resistive heating is wasteful, given the fact that we have access to marvelous and mature heat pump technology to take advantage of.
i.e.: water thermal battery is a far more efficient energy storage mechanism.
In fact it's an energy amplifying system.
Heat pump are quite efficient in most cases but alas this is Finland and their lower environmental temperature reduces the efficiency gain out of the heat pump system. What do you mean exactly by "energy amplifying system?". Water can be a nice storage medium but some regions have limited access to water. Also there is an upper limit to how much heat you can put in as water transition to steam and one would need a pressure vessel to contain it, increasing complexity and cost.
@@syjiang
When it comes to heat pump(or refrigeration plant) efficiency in the normal sense isn't quite accurate.
Standard reference is COP, which describes heat pump's effectiveness in moving heat.
In this case, resistive heating only allows for 100% heating for a given unit of electric power input, not so with heat pump - it moves a lot more than the 100 percent electric power input.
That's what I meant by 'energy amplifying'.
For the present discussion, i.e.: winter heating, heat energy can be stored at say 80 or 90 degree C, and when needed, the stored hot water can be 1. circulated as is to meet heating needs or 2. serve as input to heat pump and the outlet temperature is then raised to say 120 C and then circulated for heating instead.
The low temperature jump from 90 C to 120 C allows for COP of about 4 to 5, which is a big gain.
The slightly cooler water from the heat pump inlet is then recirculated back to storage tank.
'Setback' for such a system is the need for hot water pool or tank to store water at 80 or 90 C, but this can be sited underground.
In creativity we trust and believe 🙏🏻🙏🏻🏆
Gravity tower batteries work well too.
Why even bother with weight hung high up when you could use a tower chimney for round the clock power supply ?
How does it work ?
Chimney draft.
Do they?
@@Paul-yh8km They do. ~ 80% efficiency for the ones currently in operation.
@@aryaman05 That has been proven to have diminished results and not a practical option. In practice, the higher the draft to spin the fan, the more the draft is blocked.
@@SA-ks9vz
Efficiency doesn't equate to "work well to"
An interesting, well presented and balanced video, thanks for sharing
The Rondo battery sounds amazing
So freaking cool! Keep up the work!
CO2 reduction when baking with solar power: To simplify the calculation and to make noise correction assumptions, we will assume that all production equipment manufacturing and construction involves CO2 emissions, so the total is zero. In that case, solar power generation has almost no CO2 emissions, so we will assume that it can reduce the above 100 million tons of CO2 emissions.
Good coverage on this massive under-reported aspect of energy.
Heat expands and cold does the opposite. And both create electricity. Can we harness COLD power
30% energy loss is serious. They also don't mention the cost and maintenance of the installation to turn electricity into heat and, more importantly, to turn heat into electricity. Still nice to see they are working on these problems!
The real unlock for me will be when these are coupled with heat pumps rather than resistive heaters. I was even reading about PV-T panels that can prolong PV life and produce heat too! Upgrade that heat with heat pumps and store heating energy as heat.
Leave the salt left over from desalination to build batteries. That could be a win-win. You would get salt for energy storage and water for any number of uses.
What if they connected it to a heat pump that cooled the air inside a building and raise the temperature inside the sand battery. Use energy that would have been wasted and store it
You're talking 600 degrees C at the core, none that could do it efficiently exist.
Most things work good when electricity is free.
All good but what is the efficiency?
Sand or clay heat storage has been used for thousands of years (just look at masonry stoves/fireplaces), there is nothing new about that. When used as a heat storage the system is extremely useful, low cost, low maintenance and such economically very efficient. The issue is when this heat batteries are charged with from low density energy sources like solar-electric or wind. If charged with a DIRECT (concentrated) sunlight this make considerably more sense as, the direct sunlight is 4-4.5x times more efficient then solar-electric for a heat charging. When these heat batteries are viewed as SOURCE of electric power though, the efficiency of the entire system goes down in addition at least another 60% and it becomes extremely costly per KWh.
We the public will never see lower energy costs, unless we start building these for ourselves.
Is this what good news feels like?
what is the efficiency of thermal storage batteries compared to chemical batteries?
I don't think you understood correctly, the term "battery" being misleading. This involves converting intermittent electricity that is difficult and expensive to store into heat that can be used for industrial uses. There is no plan to subsequently return the heat in the form of electricity. This is a solution that concerns few people: only industrialists using heat. Germany's European anti-nuclear policy was harmful for this type of technology: subsidies were first allocated to anti-nuclear companies, penalizing the rest.
How about storing the solar energy in the uranium of a 6 billion year old supernova?
Sounds great, but not in my solar system. If you could do it over at proxima centauri and beam the power over so we can enjoy the electricity without having to deal with the pollution locally, then we'll be just fine.
@@brainletmong6302 What pollution? Nuclear energy has the least pollution than of any energy source. And less radioactivity than any other energy source.
only thing holding back innovation are governments and lobbyist, need those in power to prioritize pushing green innovation out as fast as possible
Well it’s also simple economics. Renewable Electricity costs ~8 ct/kWh and heating energy often costs
Early stage (up to 5 years):
Adoption of new technologies takes time, so adoption is expected to be low (e.g., less than 5%).
Mid-term stage (up to 10 years):
As technologies mature and costs fall, adoption may increase (e.g., around 20%).
Long-term stage (up to 20 years):
With improved policy support and infrastructure, adoption may increase (e.g., 50% or more).
You cannot make the temperature too high due to the efficiency of heating and difficulty of isolation. So sand solution is better.
If you put an iron scouring pad in a pyrex tube filled with water,the sun will keep boiling water because 0 heat can escape pyrex tubes.if someone can invent a more efficient conductor of sun heat,there will be a new very high efficiency battery storage combination that no one has realised yet.
Excellent
Correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t burning wood from trees which are then replanted also renewable green energy?
Shh, that screws up their narrative for control of the energy market.
Burning wood causes lot of particle emissions. Depends if you like to breath clean air or not.
Trees don't grow back at a fast enough rate for it to be renewable, and it's definitely not green cause it causes co2 emissions.
not much energy on wood, thats why we use coal
It's only renewable if the rate at which you burn the trees is less than the rate at which the trees grow.
You know the drill already, if I hear another "battery breakthrough" technology....
Sounds good to me 👍
How can this be applied to tropical countries that need cooling, not heating?
mmm maybe Sahara sand is good for something after all, if not as building material component for its too smooth surface.
Excellent future
TES is certainly a good way to store energy that the nimby's wouldnt be too quick to object to.
My last electricity bill was nearly €1000. It’s madness what’s going on
Time for EU countries to invest in these technologies. Very nice report BUT I am missing the comparison with the elephant in the room the Lithium Ion industrial battery packs. I hope that Rondo brick is cheaper and lasts longer...
Lithium is too expensive for grid-scale storage. It is probably better suited for electronic devices and electric cars.
@@thegreatdane3627 Those TESLA grid batteries is what IS being sold right now. The market thinks this is worth putting their money in. New technologies like this thermal battery have yet to prove themselves. Therefore I would like to know the price comparison at volume.
@@ocker2000 i don't think it is going to be just one type of storage in the future. Lithium batteries could be used for short term storage, with enough capacity for 1 or 2 days. That would make it much easier to manage the grid.
Thermal batteries, pumped hydro and maybe even hydrogen could be used for long term storage.
Lithium batteries will most likely be replaced by sodium-ion batteries in the near future, at least for stationary storage. I don't think we are gonna see sodium-ion batteries in mobile phones anytime soon.
Thermal batteries do not require rare earth minerals, which are hard to find and disruptive to environment, and also have longer lifecycles
This gives me a glimpse of hope for mankind. But I'm afraid this technology is too late at least 20-30 years. I mean it doesn't seem to be a particularly difficult technology to master, like fission power plants. And still nobody even bothered to give it a try a few decades ago.
Because it was not necessary obviously. Fossil fuels and nuclear power don't need energy storage as they can generate energy on demand. Renewables cannot.
@@David-bi6lf Obviously you didn't get the point I made. It was very well known 20-30 years ago that both fossil fuels and nuclear power are neither safe to operate nor sustainable in the long-term. Therefore there has been a demand for energy storage long time ago already. Simply because we [mankind] knew that our current energy supply is built on a non-sustainable basis. We are reacting on this issue way too late and maybe it is already too late... who knows.
@@David-bi6lf oh it was necessary, oil lobbyists forced us to stay away
@@Brainsucker92
There was no renewable energy to store 20-30 years ago. It was absolutely reasonable to focus on electrictiy generation first. And we did so quite succesfully. The fact that we can generate cheep electritiy from renewables today is the result of incredible innovations that took place in the last decades. The "no one bothered", "we did nothing" rhetoric somehow seems to assume that these innovations just fell out of the sky.
Btw. to this date, nuclear is actually (by far) the safest form on electricity generation.
@@fs3859 No need to respond to your post in depth. It is oozing with wrong information from start to finish. If you want to take part in a discussion, please consider using facts instead.
How about adding some real numbers: how many kilowatts of energy is stored per kilogram of sand?
Storing energy as heat doesn't make sense to me when we could use extra energy to create hydrogen through electrolysis and store it indefinitely.
We could use that hydrogen in fuel cells or burn it to create energy.
If we set up many hydrogen production plants in the Sahara Desert along the coast, we could take mirror type solar plants that focus light to heat salt to boil sea water turning it to steam that turns turbines.
The steam would go through a distillery where it would cool down, turning back into water that would be used to make hydrogen, the waste salt could be used to create more power plants or shipped to be used in other industries.
With it being a desert it is hot during the day and cold at night this would help to store the hydrogen, if we use a hydride we could avoid using energy to freeze the hydrogen and put more hydrogen into containers, with it being hot in the day the hydrogen would enter the hydride in containerships then at night the containers would cool trapping it and compressing the hydrogen.
Then the ship could go anywhere in the world using fuel cell engines heating the hydride would release the hydrogen into hydrogen power big rigs where it could be distributed around the country.
With hydrogen being explosive there are dangers that we would have to look out for and accidents would be a danger so it wouldn't be without risks.
So hydrogen will either save us or destroyer us but with it being a clean and renewable fuel I believe hydrogen is worth the risks.
While I agree hydrogen can be generated from excess electricity, storing it is way more difficult than you make it out to be. If it leaks away it's like heat loss.
@@Sekir80 You may want to look into hydride it is a safer way to store hydrogen and you can actually store more hydrogen in a smaller space than you get if you liquify the hydrogen.
Sand battery, flow Battery, Aluminum air battery, flywheel power storage
Missing: Vegetable Oil as the heat storage medium
You can make fries in the meantime.
Generating electricity using photovoltaics only to convert it resistively into heat is a horribly inefficient way of using energy. A much better way would be to convert sunlight directly into heat using lenses etc to directly 'charge' the thermal battery.
It might be better but is more complex the good Thing is it can be "Charged" with many types of thermal energy. One simple choice is electric heater,
A hot air blower or using waste heat from processes or AC
Do you remember walking on the midday beach sand under 30º C? It will burn your feet. That's what is enough...
Why use electric resistors instead of heat pipes? Seems like the conversions would be wasteful.
They have about a 98% efficiency of conversion.
@@sacrificialrubber779
It's their claim, and that too for a 1GW setup.
Heat pumps are efficient when temperature gradient is low, like the difference between the inside and outside of your house. If you're heating something to 600°C it's better to use resistive heat.
Resistors are 100% efficient at translating electrical energy into heat.
Think about it.
@@mqb3gofjzkko7nzx38
Does he mean heat pumps?
Underground not good?
Most of the Science described in these reports goes back decades. The technologies have existed much longer...
The issue here is not about Technology. It is not even about Science.
It is about Politics and Economics.
Only after the perceptions of people and the finances of government and industry are satisfied can we get to developing that what we already know.
Its only product/marketing point of view. Where are some analytics and profs its cost efficiency (not from the company itself)? A lot of this system requires a lot of time to get money back
Is this a promotion video?
I like how northern European wear uniforms, even where it's absolutely unnecessary. It shows how they are serious. Maybe it's because they have Viking blood in them.
Let's always do alot of good
I'm thinking of installing a similar innovation in my bathroom.
中国的沙漠里挺多这种熔盐塔的
BUILD. IT.
Imagine if businesses had a 480 connection they could use for storage and large applications 🤔