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You can produce Hydrogen with unwanted wind energy and burn that on demand. UK is moving to Hydrogen boilers for winter heat. Thermal batteries have been tried before and failed because the cost was 4x more expensive than renewables. See video "Billion dollar solar failure".
The urban farmer basically did this, but with the dirt under his greenhouse, some insulation panels, and pvc pipes. It worked really well at keeping his greenhouse temperature consistent, even throughout Canadian winter.
Someone complained that the earth will eventually have sand shortage, but that's only an issue for sand used in construction that needs a certain type of quality. The sand battery can use any type of sand, e.g. desert sand that doesn't qualify for construction.
When river sand runs out, the sand in demand, they will find a way to process desert sand to become fine like river sand. Just a matter of rolling it around in a cement mixer for a while, I bet.
@@TheBooban I was gonna mention river sand. I live in kansas city missouri and the river barges are constantly running for river sand as far as I know. Imagine having one unit that heated your home and water supply at the same time 😳 that's gonna get somebody on a disappearance conspiracy list 🤔 👀
Ur all bloody morons. Electricity storage is just idiocy! Oil gas and nuclear is the only way to meet the world's increasing energy crisis. If ppl want more electric vehicles we need more plants to produce it! Storage and windfarms ain't gonna even come close
I did this same thing in my shop up here in Alaska, we had to back fill within the confines of a large poured concrete foundation. I bought a semi truck load of blue foam that was being torn off of a high school roofing project and insulated what I call a thermal or dirt battery. as we back filled and compacted with sand and gravel we layered in PEX tubing, in the top strata of the dirt we laid a top grid of potable pex tubes to preheat the water going into my indirect fired water heater. I am currently charging the dirt battery with evacuated tube solar collectors, the whole thing is charged with glycol to keep it from freezing in the winter months. The system works quite well, we have almost 24 hour daylight in the summer and no heat load, so the system stores energy all summer as well as preheating my domestic hot water. The dimensions of the system are 36' x 36' by about 8' thick. by fall the system has been running around 110 to 115 F at its warmest. in addition to preheating my potable water the system can pull heat out with the same Pex that it uses to put it in and heat the shop and house radiant with the low temps. the system has been running almost maintenance free for seven years now and I have plans to double the collectors and have already built a 2,600 gallon tank into the foundation to use as my high temp battery, hoping to run this one around 180 to 200 F. to answer the question I know everyone is asking it has cut by gas consumption in half over the course of a year. almost 100% in the summer and increasing and decreasing amounts in the shoulder seasons.
This is the most promising technology you’ve presented lately….it doesn’t rely on “a miracle occurs here”. Everything needed to make this work exists today.
This is a perfect solution for college campuses or other places where they have a central heating system for multiple buildings!!! It doesn’t need to start with entire cities!! This is one of the most wise and PRACTICAL energy solutions I’ve seen in ages!! If there’s enough sun to make it work in Finland, they can use it almost anywhere!!
No rare minerals or metals needed for these storage options are honestly the most important part. This is truly a scalable. This along with the Co2 batteries seem like they could work great in tandem.
I'm curious if this could be scaled down to be used for residential batteries / heat storage, and for off grid systems. You could probably remove the inefficiencies of converting power by using fresnel lenses to super heat air during the day / summer. And use it to heat the house during the night... I'm curious what type of insolation and size would be needed to store enough mass to make a difference.
That was also my first thought. Would be pretty interesting to see if it can be scaled down to single-home use. Looks mechanically-simple too, so it might even be possible to DIY. Edit: I just realized that this would be amazing for people living in more rural areas. For example, my grandma lives in Serbia, and over there it's still normal to use wood fires to heat your home, at least in the more rural places (which is pretty much everything outside of Belgrade and a few other cities). Her house has water radiators connected to a central furnace in the basement over copper pipes. She used to have to use wood logs, but we've upgraded her to a wooden pellet system a few years ago. Which is great, because now she doesn't have to build a fire and can just press a button. But a sand battery would still be a massive improvement. The pipes are already there, and I am sure there would be a way to connect them to a sand battery, and then she wouldn't have to worry about keeping wood pellets in stock
I'm something like that could be cooked up (with help of thermal pumps). But there are actually better options, as in geothermal pump for heating.. .and run it the other way during summer months (so cool the building and dump the excess heat into the same ground used for heating during colder spells). That has been done in some commercial (office/shopping mall) buildings, and it is not too costly if the foundations require a lot of pile driving anyway (piles make a good thermal mass). Naturally the heating and cooling needs to be designed so that they can be done. Retrofitting such a system might be quite spendy, less so for new builds. Using a higher temp minimized sand thermal battery might be easier to retrofit into existing residential buildings, but there is often a critical mass required when the heat loss is acceptable. Too small, and it won't hold the "heat" to be economically viable.
It would be interesting to dump waste heat from other home appliances into a thermal storage unit like this. For example your air conditioner and refrigerator both dump the heat they pull from the area they are cooling into the environment as waste heat. If that hot air could be pushed through a heat battery first it could add energy that would normally be lost. It would probably not be enough heat by itself, but it would just be wasted otherwise.
Matt I just want to say thank you, I’ve been watching your videos for a couple months now and you have completely changed the way I think about sustainability. Your scripts are so well thought out and your articulation makes complex ideas simply to comprehend. Definitely my most anticipated TH-cam videos I wait to be uploaded, thank you for the effort, time and knowledge you share with us
Sorry not sorry but no no no! The problem causing all u kids stupidity these days is getting ur info from idiotz on TH-cam! But FYI most of this video is completely wrong and false information! The reason ur all so thick in America is because u think Google and TH-cam are feeding u the facts but they are not!
I made a sand heat store for my wood burning stove. Keeps giving up heat for about 20+ hours after the stove has gone out. Also has water heat store to pump around the radiators when the temp drops too much. This allows me to do a fairly short burn in the evenings. Also I burn it at a much higher temp than I normally would which makes for a much more efficient and complete combustion of the fuel. It will allow for expansion to use solar thermal or pv for heating the water tank to make up for the heating shortfall on cooler days in the summer (I live in the uk). With the energy prices going up so fast here it really is making people think how to make their homes more efficient.
This is yet another reminder that more cities need to invest in district heating networks. This is one of many potential techs out there which would drastically reduce emissions by taking advantage of one….but many of our cities don’t have district heating so they won’t be able to take advantage of it :-(
@Li Heli sure. These systems require upkeep. But paying for that upkeep via taxes is rarely as expensive as when you tally up all the upkeep that us individuals pay on our own little private systems. So we still win as a group overall. But we have to get the messaging right in order to help people realize that deploying something like this may raise your taxes, and that’s actually a good thing.
Detroit HAD district heating from coal fired electric plants. Then we started phasing out the old and dying coal plants and they sold the district heating to Enron. Which raised prices for heat to high cost and for 2+ years a goodly portion of Detroit's central heat district scrambled to convert to gas fired boilers (3 year payback on package boilers vs Enron)(steam was the medium for transfer and Detroit was the "condenser" for the power plants - adsorption cooling for the summer). So, if building managers are going to buyin and this is going to work, it must be regulated and treated as a utility or some structure to avoid the gouging as Enron did to cause a reversal effect.
@@DominicFalcon The point of the video was, that you still need electricity for it to work (relating to heatpumps) and in current market, there are too few cheap and scaleable options for renewables to store excess energy during the peak production hours and disperse it in form of an electricity. I.e. the problem is that you need more diverse forms of energy exchange rather than straight up electro-chemical batteries for energy storage. Heat pumps are a great solution only if your source of energy is nuclear or hydro (easy to adjust and to throttle).
Using unrecyclable brown or green glass, powered, for the sand would also create a use for the material instead of sending it to a landfill. Using glass instead of sand would also keep the glass out of the waste stream. And the glass has the same properties for high heat storage as sand.
There is a start-up in New Orleans that is recycling glass back into sand. they pulverise it till it is the size of sand grains. certain coloured glasses blue, red and green they turn into ornamental sand for use in gardens and architectural uses and the rest they use to help restore coastal wetlands with the help of an environmental organisation restoring wetlands around New Orleans to help mitigate damage from hurricanes. So far the results look promising with all testing showing the product is environmentally safe and the local plants happily spreading into the new sand banks.
@@JustWasted3HoursHere do you have any sources for this? I only know you can not mix brown and green into white, but they are fine if they are not mixed and it is not so much a problem for brown and green. Or is this a local thing because where you live other colours are used for those glasses? Edit: Ok, i also just found out the USA only recycles about 33% of glass while Germany does 84% (we use much green and brown) and Slovenia even 99%. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_recycling
@@zapfanzapfan This is the glass that can't be recycled Any glass mixed with other materials. Decorative glass. Mixed-color glass. Dirty glass or glass caked with food waste. Ceramics or dishware. Pyrex and other types of heat-resistant glass. Window glass Mirrors Crystal Light bulbs Computer or television screens Cathode-ray tubes
In Finland we have district heating in every major city and it's absolutely awesome. So cheap and efficient. This sand storage seems super promising due to it's simplicity. I hope those sand heat storage systems get deployed in every Finnish city soon. We could send excess renewable power into those immediately while we simultaneously ramp up electrochemical and mechanical energy storage.
@@happylatino Apparently many Finnish cities are looking into smaller scale nuclear power (SMR/MMR) for powering those systems instead of coal or biomass, which are the most common heat sources. This can still be utilized by nuclear Cogen plants. Just store heat when not needed, liberate it when needed. For conversion into electricity its ridiculously inneficient.
This type of storage is far too low density, 8MWh is what you'd need for a single house to call it seasonal. The government will waste some tax money on it and other useless projects and thus we pave the path to hell with good intentions.
They might be looking into those but smr won't ever happen with current legislation. It's far to strict. And secondly nuclear will not power district heating without electricity conversion first
It's interesting what Sri lanka can do as here the country is so warm almost everyday, and we have plenty of sun as well. we can use solar panels and store all the heat in these silos, and then use them steadily by connecting them to the grid. our whole power outage problem will go away.
Definitely has a chance of catching on! This could also help greenhouse installations and prevent the need for extra heating with gas during colder seasons. If the materials for this installation are this freely available, silo-builders, now working for farmers that wish to store grains or other crop, could easily diversify to these large batteries!
For heat storage the theory is really simple: Surface area increases by the second power, but volume increases by the third power. So, for example, the surface area of a sphere is 4 * pi *r ^2 while its volume is (4/3) * pi * r^3. The ability for sand or any medium to retain heat is primarily a function of this ratio... the only way to lose the heat in the storage medium is through its surface area. So scale winds up being very important. The bigger the storage medium, the more efficiently it can store heat. The problems are many, though. All heat storage devices have thermal expansion and contraction stresses so a daily cycle can really be quite harsh on the infrastructure. In other-words, maintenance can wind up being a relatively large component of the operating cost. Particularly if major portions of the device are inaccessible (aka sand battery). Liquid (e.g. syrup consistency) based systems are far easier to maintain because no internal structures are required... you just pump the liquid through a loop just like a heat-pump water heater does. Phase-change materials that go between liquid and gas are even better because the energy density is typically far higher. It will be interesting to see how these progress, but it is a fairly tall order to compete against battery technologies which can be produced in GWh volumes and get cheaper and cheaper every year.
@@timgurr1876 Surface area limiting factor only matters in how small the system can be and still be efficient enough for use, there is literally no limiting factor in how big the system can be, other than the materials used to build the sand holding. The bigger the system, the more efficient in storing the heat.
This seems like a great option for energy storage. However, I see a greater problem in the U.S.A., we are not insulating our homes to be efficient. In my area, they are still building stick homes without an exterior insulation wrap. Better insulation means less heating and cooling in the first place. Cheers
Exaclty, first thing i ask people, are you warmer when you wrap yourself in a coat, or are you warmer by cutting the coat into strips and stuffing between your ribs. They tend to come to correct conclusion all on their own lmfao
My son did a science project in the 8th grade, comparing roof construction to solar gain. We found that roofs heat houses thru radiation. Radiant heat barriers prevent 90% of room heating. Radiant heat barriers are cheap and super easy to install during new construction. I asked a friend who is an engineer for large housing projects if they were using radiant heat barriers, he'd never heard of it. My main garage, here in Florida is too hot to work in during the summer. So i'm installing radiant heat barriers, a challenging project in my house with a very low attic, I can barely sit in it under the peak of the roof. So you're 100% correct.
I agree. The building codes in America are horribly written. They heavily favor developer-friendly, box style "McHomes", not longevity, good living, or comfort. The insulation is grossly inadequate.
This reminds me of the off-peak storage heater we had in the UK in the 60s. It used cheap electricity at night to heat up bricks in the heater and then released the energy slowly throughout the day to heat the house. The storage time was clearly quite limit, but it's the same basic principal. The efficiency was 100%. In the future, with an excess of solar energy during the day, it could be used to store energy for use at night when there is clearly no solar energy production.
@@LongWindedUsername Electricity moving through wires generates heat as a byproduct, so as a result, electricity-to-heat conversions are 100% efficient conversions. As such, electricity to heat brick, then brick to heat home is as near-100% efficiency as you can possibly get.
@@TheBooban This system is still used today - mostly in flats I would think, but I bought a house just a few years ago that only had this system of storage radiators plus one coal fire. I also have two flats that use this system. It is very much alive in Britain.
I love this. Sand is so plentiful. I know stones were used as heat storage in earth buried ovens thousands of years ago. I personally have dug stones days later from a large fire pit only to find they are still very very warm. I wonder if you can skip the above ground storage and just dig deep enough where there is natural insulation, or would that be too much direct thermal conduction with the surrounding earth?
You would still want to insulate it, but it would be a good idea for particularly chilly climates. Going down just a handful of feet the ground evens out the temperature evens out to ~50°F, a trick used by geothermal heat pumps. A air heat pump can work to heat one’s house in negative temperatures, but it’s more efficient at higher temperatures, same goes for insulation.
The issue with using hot air heating instead of steam heating, is that the specific heat of Steam is 1.996 kJ/kgK while the specific heat of Air is between 1 and 1.2 kJ/kgK. That means that Steam carries at least twice the energy per unit (mass temp) than air, and some sources say that it can be up to 4 times. That's not even taking into account the heat transfer coefficients of steam vs. air. Air is a decent insulator, that means it's not nearly as good at transferring heat as other substances; meaning that you're either going to have to push more hot air through the system to get the same heating effect as with steam, or the heating will be less. Either way, it's not nearly as efficient as the steam it would be replacing.
Wouldn't the square-cube-law work in our favour here? Just scale it up massively and have lots of storage volume for not a lot of surface area over which heat can escape by comparison. Or what is the limiting factor?
The limiting factor would be the size of the area of that usable thermal energy. This works great in the narrow example of areas that will intermittently produce excess heat and alternately need more heat than they're producing on site over a span of less than a few months, but once you need to move that heat offsite over any appreciable distance, the lack of capable enough insulation compounded over distance would cause massive losses in energy in the piping; this is why you probably have your own water heater and don't pay for a hot water line from across town.
@@mtnbkr5478 In fact, our district heating works like that - there is cold water supply to the houses, part of the fresh water is heated in a heat exchanger - so yes, we buy hot water from across town, sort of :-)
@@pohjoinenkala9301 That's pretty impressive. I was originally thinking that there would be a lot of energy lost in moving heat over a large area like that, but if the system is constant and well insulated it would make sense that those losses would be minimized. Thank you!
This is a genius idea. Even if it can be used only for heating direcly, it still *indirectly* saves electricity that otherwise would be used for heating.
@@FrancisKoczur The hottest achieved with a heat pump is 356 F. The key to this is thinking about what you are trying to optimize. In this case, capacity and capital costs to handle dunkelflaute. You may not need to cycle this thing much. Also, hopefully, the resistive heater is very cheap, so you can use overproduction, or at least cheap power. This will never displace batteries, but batteries are expensive for occasionally used capacity.
6:00 Small note on this point. Russian gas has NEVER played a big role in heating Finnish homes. In 2020 natural gas had 6% share of total energy consumption in Finland. In 2020 renewables also surpassed fossil fuels in the total energy consumption.
How did their renewable systems pop into existence? Manual labor, or was fossil fuel energy involved? You have to count the fossil inputs (mining, smelting, manufacture, transport, installation, maintenance, etc. of the "renewable" system) else "sustainable" is just a marketing trick wave breaking against a sea wall of sluggish minds. There's a point where *some* renewable systems break even, then start producing a net gain. Some. Most break before they ever get to that elusive zero-point. After that point, yay! But, it's unlikely (m)any of your renewable systems have broken even yet, and until that point, you'd have been better off burning the dino squeezins, or saving them for fertilizers, pesticides, tires, pharmaceuticals, and surgical tubing. It's difficult to do, but one must count every joule of Flintstones energy input, and subtract it from the purple-hair-new-age output before a truly legit smug can ensue. It does occasionally happen, but it's never a given as so many ignorant people presume. Confidence games are complex on purpose, and con game victims are always incredibly lazy (or emotional) thinkers. Be the skeptic/scientist instead.
The biggest question i have about this technology was barely touched on How can they insulate that sand tank ? Keeping sand at 600°C for months ? This seems unfeasible to me
I watched a bunch of vids on this and did a tad bit of research and...this is easy and actually achievable in most areas..hopefully this tech takes off to help power our future...thumbs up
Sure, it is nice to see different points of view in the new technologies, Matt with the USA market and Dave with the British/Europe side of thing...but it would be nice to have somebody covering in every continent, specially in Africa or South America and see how such technologies would shape a less developed environment.
@@UndecidedMF "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery," but I saw it here first. Good job! I'm a long-time subscriber. I think I could save a lot of electricity if I try to implement something like this for my home heating in the winter and maybe my water heating year round. No electricity needed probably if I heat with lots of mirrors during the warmest part the day on a high-heat absorbant surface of the tank and then insulate that whole thing during the night, and I have all the sand I need in my immediate area. I just need to build an insulated tank with a thermally conductive section that I can seal up easily
I did not realize that sand Towers like that could hold so much heat. I would think the heat would dissipate after a few months. Love to see more info on it. Good idea
That's so true. I live in the tropics and during the day you can barely step on it. Especially our sand which mostly has a lot of iron. I wonder how iron rich sand works.
I would be interested in you covering some of the older more localized heat storage systems. In the uk as a kid we had large boxes in many homes that were full of bricks. The bricks would get heated during off peak electrical usage. I also recall an air conditioning system that froze a cube of water off peak and then used that block of ice to help cool during peak heat.
In the old days there were also the heat magazine stove(or however it translates to English.). It had a huge core of iron that was kept heated all day with electricity and when the need came for cooking you could use up all that stored heat. It was in the time when electricity was metered by the line capacity and not the energy usage and so it was most economical for households to have a constant electricity use throughout the day.
Here in Scandinavia we are already having at times fully wind powered countries like Denmark. In coming years we are going to be at times swamped by huge excess of wind born electricity. All over Scandinavia. Finns, Swedes and Norwegians have the space for farms that no-one needs to hear or see, and we really do have wind most of the year. Way to industrial scale store that excess energy might be right there.
Nice summary of the technology - like many great ideas, it's impressively simple. Couple of points: 1) Resistive heating is a good thing to start with, since it's cheap and simple. But 100% efficient is actually not that good! Heat pumps can get >300% efficiency for heating. But they're more expensive, more complicated, and I'm not sure if they can reach anywhere near the temperatures needed. 2) Water can be used at much greater than 100°C as superheated steam, under high pressure. That's the technology all big fossil fuel and nuclear power stations use to move heat around and to drive the turbine. It's also what this company is using to transfer heat out of the sand. And why it's all off-the-shelf parts.
@@vygag Welcome to the interesting world of thermodynamics: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump "With 1 kWh of electricity, they can transfer 3 to 6 kWh of thermal energy into a building"
@@vygag It's a 200 year old idea, and is already a multi-billion dollar industry. All refrigerators and air conditioners use this concept. The key point is that a heat pump doesn't create heat - it simply moves it from one place to another. So it's not really >100% efficient - it's just cheating by solving a different problem. But happily for most uses of heat, we don't care if the heat was created or simply moved from somewhere else.
ive pondered the same question for months now. after hearing matts explanation on the topic i think contruction sand maybe more energy dense if they are choosing leftover construction material over its cheaper and more abundant desert counter part. but equaly it could be minimal and a choice made for waste reduction.
Awesome, appreciate the thoughts! Certainly agree going local makes sense - kinda thinking through what materials have no current market around the world and where solar plants are located. Could see this being ported for solar plants, seems cheaper that molten salts. Assuming temps are not high enough to drive turbines?
Yes, I believe sand batteries can be a good heat storage medium. Even if a tower collapsed (ex. in an earthquake) there's no real environmental damage; just wait for the sand to cool and rebuild the tower. . One minor correction: water "can" exceed 212F/100C, when under pressure (albeit not by a lot). That's how a pressure canner works. At 15psi, a pressure canner gets water up to 240F/116C.
Small correction around the 9:30 mark - Water can be heated above 100C, and is often heated beyond that. High pressure can raise the boiling point of water to a fairly high amount. You probably don’t want to pipe high pressure hot water beyond a facility, as high temperature steam is scary stuff, but for energy storage as long as you have a pressure vessel (ie boiler) you can heat water beyond 100C without it boiling.
You mentioned that they obtain a high round trip efficiency of near 100% by using resistance heaters, however don't heat pumps deliver much more heat energy for a given input of electrical energy? I'm pretty sure the reasoning for this is that heat pumps take heat from the environment and simply move it rather than convert the electrical energy directly into heat. Meaning you can effectively obtain efficiencies even greater than 100% in terms of heat energy delivered over electrical energy consumed. I think this avoids violations in thermodynamics as the conversion from heat to electrical energy would be inherently less efficient meaning you don't create net energy in the process.
This video and articles about batteries all have the same problem, they never mention that that they add cost to your electric bill and our focus should be on renewables that do NOT need batteries first. To make solar and wind energy reliable you have to greatly over build what you would need because it doesn't produce all the time and use massive battery backup systems to capture energy when it is producing for use later. They never include the cost of overbuilding and the battery systems when they tell you it's cheaper. Batteries cost money to build, to maintain, and batteries wear out and need to be replaced. Batteries are not 100% efficient so when you charge a battery you do NOT get all the power back. So, in the end batteries add cost to your electric bill but are a necessary evil to make wind and solar reliable. Pumped hydro and sand work just like a battery and has the same problems as batteries do. The EPA calls pumped hydro a negative renewable because it uses more energy than it makes. What would be better than wind, solar, batteries? Geothermal power which is also a renewable and it works 24 hours a day, week after week, month after month just like coal, natural gas, and nuclear. Geothermal and Biomass/Biogas should always be looked at first to see if it is a good fit for your location. If it is not, then look at solar and wind just realize it's NOT cheaper.
WOW! :D Amazing video Matt! Thanks! We are planning to make a trigeneration product where we could turn heat back to electricity in places where there is large heat consumption also, like DH network. Then it doesn't matter if electrical efficiency is 25% because you can but the rest to DH network from the turbine condenser. Actually that also is basic stuff here with "combined heat and power" CHP plants.
I think you could use this to heat your home. You wouldn't need a large scale application for a single family home. A solar furnace isn't that difficult to build. The heated sand would allow for a longer period of heating after the sun sets.
Agreed... We need to de-centralize most services water, sanitation, electricity, heating, etc., giving people independence. Also, when there is a system failure it only effects 1 household not thousands!
@@onestoptechnologies7305 i have to disagree. The scale associated with centralizing energy systems brings huge efficiency gains compared to home scale systems (internal combustion generator ~30%, gas or coal power plant ~40-50%). In addition, the investment costs divided by the amout of people that are served are much lower with industrial scale power. And as for reliability, much of it is down to a proper funding scheme either not funneling money to corporate or municipal operators not skimping on costs. I have lived in a district heated home my whole life, and so does half of the population of finland, my home country, in both single family homes and units. There has never been an outage that has affected my life and as long as i have followed the news has there never been a story about a district heating outage. And as far as electrical power, there has never in my life been an outage in the cities. Rural areas sometimes see some homes go without for a few hours if a tree falls on the line, but cities have roughly 100% underground electrical power lines. Never any system wide failures like in texas 2021 either, and our grid has more wind than texas and has a colder climate. In short, if the central system is not reliable, one should rather invest into if and fund it well rather than abandon it in favour of small scale power.
@@otsokivivuori7726 I can understand why one might think it would be "better." However, efficiency is not the "be-all and end-all." Unfortunately, I have seen power outages cause deaths. In the last 2 years alone, almost 1,000 people died in just the State of Texas. Finland is 29 times smaller than the USA and only 720 miles long, so transmission loss is less of a factor. 97% of the USA is considered "Rural," yet still contains nearly 20% of the population (60 million.... 12x the population of Finland). It's not uncommon to be able to drive for hours without seeing a stop sign while passing many homes. In the USA, we have transmission lines that were installed for the purpose of transporting electricity more than 1,200 miles from hydroelectric sources in the North to population centers in the hot areas of the South. Interestingly, you comment about Finland being "colder" that Texas... power transmission is better in cold conditions than hot. Computer systems migrated from the "Centralized Computing Model" to the "De-Centralized Computing Model" we have today. Most systems today are designed the concept of "Lots of Little." Distributed versus Centralized. Even the "centralized" systems you are lauding, are not truly centralized... (One single power generator for the entire country.) They still have de-centralized power generators throughout the country, so the real question is just about where to draw the line... Country?, City?, Neighborhood?, Home? Most "Life and Safety" systems are required to be localized and independent because they are so important. It might be more efficient to centralize all food preparation and eliminate all kitchens in homes; no cooking fires, no untrained people preparing food, less food illness, but would that really be better? Governments throughout history have implemented many "efficient" solutions but rarely are they the better for the people. I've never heard someone describe any government led venture as monetarily "efficient." Governments do not have their own money... they just take money from the people and spend it. I can assure you that individuals will spend their own money in more effective and judicious ways than ANY bureaucracy. The USA was built upon self-reliance and self-sufficiency, coupled with concern for our fellow man. Individual States that are United! I think we are better versions of ourselves when we grow from children who are helpless and dependent, to adults that are knowledgeable and independent. Small solar systems augmented with an additional diversified source and local storage encourages people to be more mindful of their energy usage, very scalable with demand and eliminates massive transmission losses. If your neighbor loses power, you can go help them or invite them into your home until it's fixed... instead of freezing to death right next door.
I think it's a brilliant idea...when attending the University of Toronti, I discovered that all the buildings on the main campus were heated by steam piped from a single heat-producing building - it would certainly make sense to convert that system to this sand- battery technology. Thank you Matt for continually sharing these important ideas!
Honestly, I find it hard to believe that a steel cylinder storage container can retain the heat of the hot sand of 600°C for 6 months until the winter arrives.
I live close to a outdoor skiing area. During the late winter, snow is gathered and created during the last cold weeks into a huge pile of snow maybe a 100m long and 20m tall. It is covered in wood chips and left there for the whole summer season, to be used to kickstart the next season of skiing. The snow holds surprisingly well and a reduction in size of the covered snow pile is not really noticable. The thermal mass of these big dense storages is not too be underestimated when the surface area is so small.
@@leonardschoyen oh wow I didnt know that! Thats interesting! But whats your usual temperature there? See if snow is around 0°C and the ambient temperature is around 25°C then the difference is 25 and that affects the rate of heat transfer. Here it seems like the difference would be around 600-25=575°C which means the rate of heat transfer is much higher. If i recall correctly from high school physics that is, the higher the difference in temperature the faster the rate of change.
@@StormyMusic9 It's true that the heat transfer is proportional to the difference in heat, but it is also only proportional to the surface area of the shape (the square of the length). The heat carrying capacity is proportional with the cube of the length of the shape. A doubling of size results in 8 factor increase in carrying capacity, but only 4 factor increase in heat transfer, meaning the relative heat lost is halved, and allowing for twice the temperature differential with the same efficiency. The system showed in the video essentially amounts to a prototype, with its small size.
Maybe a little late, and I really hope you read this comment. In the Netherlands, there is a sustainable 'village' being build at the moment. It's called ecodorp Boekel. 36 houses are going to be heated by heat produced in the summer, stored in a huge container full of steel slag and concrete, and used in the winter. The container will be heated up to 450 degrees Celsius by 600 solar panels, which should be enough energy for all 36 houses throughout the winter. The system used is called CESAR, developed by Cees van Nimwegen. You should definitely look into this development, as it's already built and in use!
I've been thinking, would it make sense to fill a room in cellar with sand for heat storage like this? As heating bills have skyrocketed, larger houses are now cheaper than smaller ones, meaning empty space is practically free.
Interesting concept. I like that it doesn't use lithium batteries because it's tailored to a specific purpose where batteries are not necessary. But as an HVAC engineer I can't help but wonder how they insulate the tanks! It doesn't matter that much what the temperature is outside; if it's 1000°F in the tank, the difference between 90° and 40° ambient isn't much - I would expect them to be hemorrhaging heat year round. Since we're talking about storage at a seasonal level I would love to know how they address it!
That's on my mind also. I guess it doesn't much matter how much heat it loses because it's utilizing excess energy. I'd love to see the simplicity of this sand battery compared to the 5th generation cold district heating that utilizes heat pumps to extract and reject heat from a near ambient loop. My big holdup with this sand battery is the resistant heating, why go for 100% efficiency if you can have 400% efficiency in both summer and winter with heat pumps. And while it might not be as simple as sand, a massive tank of water isn't exactly much more complicated, especially when you can use it for both heating and cooling and it's already the medium being used to transport the energy throughout the heating district.
Man, I don't know why why don't put solar panels Infront of the sun like we did that telescope recently to get those photographs. The. We have solar 24/7 in one fat array and we can then lazerbeam the photons back to panels on earth to solar panels all over during nighttime by bouncing the photons off big mirrors all the way around to the dark side. Wouldn't have to hit every panel on every house. Could just hit the big huge powerplant arrays to make a large amount of solar 24/7 instead of just during the day. Sounds kinda crazy but doesn't sound kinda crazy man idk. people doing some crazy things these days
I really like this option, it's supper simple with almost no environmental risk from failure or end of life deconstruction. The only issue I can see is retrofitting it into existing infrastructure; you named a few cities in the US which have community heating systems, and a lot of further eastern European and Russian cities have that too, but in Western Europe and the UK especially there's nothing like that, so the system would have to be made from the ground up in already hugely congested underground urban environments.
One thing I wanna highlight about this kind of tech, which is the scalability of heat batteries. The amount of thermal energy depends on the material, and also very importantly, its mass. Mass is a result of volume. On the other hand the heat lost to surrounding is based on the temperature difference and the surface area. As you make the battery bigger, the mass goes up by dimension cubed while the surface area expands only by dimension squared. The bigger the battery is, the more efficient it becomes. And when going big, its worth it to find cheap but dense materials. No limitations on specific elements, no limitations of geography, just dump as much stuff into the tank and time to go
My smallholding has sand and gravel beneathe the topsoil.....LOTS of it. I'm going to dig an area out, heavily insulate the void, return the dried sand with internal heat deposit and retrieval infrastructure, then use a dedicated PV system to run it. A game changer that uses what I already have!
Heating the sand could be made even more efficient with a heat pump, instead of using a resistive heating element. Yes, you can have greater than 100% efficiency. The main benefit I could see of using a resistive heating element, is lower maintenance and production costs, as well as a longer lifespan. But figuring out which heating method is better in this application is more complicated math than I can do. I think this kind of battery would be useful in key locations where a facility of some kind produces a lot of waste heat, and happens to be close to an area that heating is in demand. Perhaps a mid-scale bakery could store waste heat in such a battery during operational hours, to be used during the entire day and night, acting as a capacitor for heat. If this sand battery is kept small enough in scale, it could potentially be combined with more of itself by hooking them up in series. That way, if the attached facility is decommissioned, the sand batteries can be salvaged and moved somewhere else, allowing them to be reused.
Exactly! Why not use a heat pump to put the heat in? If the point is to use it in the summer, then it will be helped by the higher outside temperature.
@@manveroo1340 Ah! Thanks to you calling it a heat pump, I realized I called it the wrong thing. I used accidentally used heat exchanger instead of heat pump. (A heat exchanger may be a part of a heat pump, but it doesn't actually concentrate heat, it facilitates the flow of concentrated heat to an area of less concentrated heat, in a manner planned for by the engineer.) I'll edit it. And yes, the heat pump would be good in relatively warm environments. Environments like Earth. Because even the coldest biomes on Earth are a good deal warmer than absolute zero. Assuming you are concentrating heat from the environment, then the closer the ambient heat is to your target temperature, the more efficient the heat pump will be. A resistive heating element may still be useful at the very upper end of the heat range for what the sand battery is capable of holding. I'm not sure if a heat pump can operate at the same upper temperature limits as a heating element.
@@World_Theory You won´t get the same temps as resistive heating, if heat pumps could pump out 600°C temperature all our problems would be solved instantly. What heat pumps would need is a different gas to compress and decompress
Only thing better than a squirrel chasing a ball is a bunny with a pancake on his head. They add amazing quality to your post. Like if you understand this inside joke.
This tech could be incorporated into parking garages. Those are just large concrete heat sinks that gather heat during the summer and that heat just dissipates without being used for anything. Driveways, sidewalks, and streets and highways can also be added. Streets and highways can also have piezoelectric elements into them that turns the normal use flexing into electricity. (Yeah, the average street or freeway does go thru minor flexing due to normal traffic usage and expansion/contraction due to heat differentials. It's not visible to the eye until after the cracks start forming.)
I got excited and crimped some nichrome wire to an XT60 connector and put it in a box of playground sand and plugged that in to my 100W solar panel. The nichrome worked great, I even got a little burn on my finger. The playground sand has two issues though... it doesn't conduct the heat to the rest of the sand from around the heating element... and it doesn't retain that heat (I checked it one hour after the solar panel was shaded.) I see from other comments that quartz sand is preferred.... will try this. I'd love to have a place where my cat can sit outside during the winter.
Similar to some of my other comments on your excellent videos, biochar and pyrolysed hydrochar (650-800 deg C) could be used instead of sand and store a lot more energy. The char can also be doped or modified for storage and conductance, with the pyrolysis process generating plenty of heat. Some of the hydrochar (biocoal) and biochar could be used in natural gas broilers, which would also decarbonise steel and cement industries. The char would last longer, and when it needs to be replaced, the spent char could go into soils or concrete for carbon sequestration depending on the contaminant level.
Dear @Matt thank you for a great video. I would like to add, that there are many "sand" and material times currently rated as a waste which we consider to be highly applicable as well
It makes no sense that they would use resistance heating when they could be using a heat pump and getting 4x the energy out of it. It would most likely limit the temperatures, but better to heat more material effectively than less to high temps. Multistage high temperature heat pumps could be designed though. The surface area to volume ratio decreases with increasing size so there is less area to lose heat per volume stored by using more material potentially at lower temps vs less at higher. Also lower temps have less of a thermal gradient to drive heat transfer/loss. It may limit the use of the heat being a lower temperature, but that is already going to be limited by the whole mass cooling down over time.
Not sure about the rest of the world but in the UK we often have hot water storage tanks in our homes. The water is heated at night when the electricity is cheaper and can be topped up as needed throughout the day if more is needed. I think it would be great if these tanks had a sand ‘jacket’ that was heated using solar panels on the building. It would be a great way of storing green energy for your own home without the expensive need to attach your panels to the grid. Especially as you get very little back from the supplier for each watt you supply. You wouldn’t even need to change the hot water tank or attached heating system much as the existing system will only heat the water if it needs to. If the sand jacket was sufficient to heat the water to say 40 degrees Celsius, much less energy would be required to top it up.
I could dig up under my parking area in front of my house. Isulate that hole on the bottom and sides, fill it with sand and add some piping, and then insulate it on top. Having the heat storage sunken, you loose less heat during the winter time. On the roof of the parking area there could be solar panels. The extra energy, not used during the day, gets converted into heating the sand, from under the driveway. During the evening, when the panels do not produce, use the stored heat in the sand under the driveway to heat the house. Did I get all this right?
I love the idea of harvesting energy and using it in the same form, rather than converting it multiple times, it just makes sense and i hope we will see more of that kind of thinking in the energy industry and for all the engineering challenges that we are facing today.
I like it! I do wonder why the heating element aren't embedded in the sand itself. I can see the advantage of keeping this above-ground as it makes installation trivial. But this could also be stored underground, and reduce the need for insulation.
You forgot to ask a few important question.. what is used as a heat transfer fuild to and from the battery to achive temperatures of 1200 as most oil will burn up at high temperatures... molt salts will not flow untill temp achived... what material are used to insulate this heat storage.
About the stopped windmills. I travel from Phoenix to San Diego regularly. The vast majority of the stopped windmills are in need of repair. Went to SD 3 weeks ago and it was obvious that several had caught fire and that's just what you can see driving by. Almost all the first generation (12-15yrs ago) are not working because their wing edges have deteriorated so much that it takes a hurricane wind to make them turn. Some have been stopped for a few years now so I'm guessing it is just too expensive to fix them.
I think there is some confusion going on here, there is no way to pipe hot water or heat directly to where it is needed, the heat has to be converted back into electricity to be transmitted over wires and then used to create heat at the destination, so this doesn't in any way address the need for heat in a factory miles away or homes nearby. A heat battery would have to be located at each and every place the heat is needed to directly apply the heat to some sort of application.
I have question: On tropical country, Cold water is needed. Can we use this technology to pump a cooler water temperature (7 deg Celsius) to the sand silo then utilitize this stored cooler water supply.
@@markhathaway9456 th-cam.com/video/0rzQhSXVq60/w-d-xo.html. The chiller machine will cool the water and pump it to the sand because in my opinion maybe sand has high thermal inertia characteristics that's why it can keep storing hot temperature for a longer time. I think maybe it can store colder temperature too. This is only my opinion you can correct if I have flaws and mistakes in my thoughts.
Minor correction: You said Russia cut gas. This is true, but in Finland, very few actually use gas for heating. We use electricity, oil, coal etc. but very little natural gas. Finland was not really affected by the cut. Germany, on the other hand, was affected a lot.
So what's the feasibility of taking an existing indirect water heater tank and turning it into a sand battery? Indirect water heaters already have heat exchanger coils for water running through them and these water tanks are designed for thermal storage of water. Water is not potentially as hot as the sand, so maybe the current materials used for these devices is not up to the task, but if it works, you could put one of these into every home and make it work with existing heating systems.
What about black sand( aka iron oxides) which is abundant and can be extracted with a electomagnetic field. Has a higher melting point and would hold heat longer, just as easy to get 🤔. Definitely worth looking into. 👌
One thing not discussed is the considerable loss in efficiency that results from using resistive heating rather than a heat pump. Heat pumps effectively reduce energy needs for heating by a factor of 3 to 5. That efficiency boost is lost with this method. You could potentially use heat pumps for the initial storage, but this drastically increases the complexity. You would also likely need multi-stage pumps to achieve the desired temperatures.
My town has a huge heat storage that uses water. But the electric heating and silo shape is something they share. It takes excess renewable energy and supplements the city heating system. Thus it cuts down on gas and coal use.
Do you think the cold counterpart could be done for use in areas where heating is not as needed? Like refrigerating a bunch of sand with the excess energy and have it be insulated against getting warm. Then the cool air could get distributed to a metropolitan area.
I wonder if heat storage could be used as a buffer to warm water before sending it to a power plant. I’m assuming less fuel would be needed to create steam.
If air is moved through the sand storage, No loss in pipes to transfer the heat with another medium. In my area there is several hundred feet layer of air filled sand below the ground above the water table. 56 degree air could be heat pumped down to 35. There would also be the phase change of moist in the cooling of the 100% humidity air to 35 degrees. This Condensate is drinking water quality. Plus a heat pump will use ground heat when atmosphere air is below 56.
This sounds really good. I think the only big problem is figuring out how to store the heat for long enough. But this sounds perfet for municipal heating which is very common in Europe. And even during the summer, people use hot water. So why not heat it with stored solar or wind energy rather than burning gas? This sould help rationing energy a lot better and more efficiently.
What happened about the copper heat storage we heard about some months ago? It consisted of a couple of gigantic graphite blocks with a few tons of copper sealed within each. The copper was heated to melting point with the excess power and then this was later used to vaporise water for a steam turbine to recover the power when needed. It seemed like a great way to store energy since it could be installed in redundant coal fired generation sites.
This scales up very well. Volume of a cylinder increases faster than surface area so a larger unit has more storage volume with less surface area to lose heat. It does not scale down very well for the same reason... be hard to keep it at 600*C for months if it's only the size of say an oil barrel.
I went down this road somewhat in 1976, you can not imagine the problems that water can create, you must find a better medium for the thermal heat transfer first. Glycol, is better but not without problems.
Wonder what they could do with peanut shell, long ago in Florida I saw smoke coming from the pile of shells and owner said if you take a raw turkey in foil and bury it, it can cook fully in 4 hours
would storing heat and insulating it be more efficient than just using the weight of the sand to make a gravity battery? Wouldn't that also be more ideal for months long storage considering it wouldn't lose any energy over time at all and only on storage?
@@razeclp3989 I asked a question, i am fully aware of what happened in the video. Did you read my question? I even stated that theyre storing heat and asked if itd be more efficient than a gravity battery over time
Nice video. One correction: Russian gas or lack or it is actually almost no problem in Finland. Most of the district heating companies use other energy sources including renewables. But yes we do have too long and cold winters.
I've heard theories about ancient Egypt using wireless electricity and river as distribution but learning this, now it makes more sense that sand can store energy that well..
We help build one of these for a farm the heat level was a lot lower and it was solar water heater it heated the sand, but the sand bank lasted all winter , and charge all summer. I have another I solar heat my shed and store the heat in wax last about 72 hours . will keep above 50 at the floor and 137 at the roof since it for dogs they love it.
Man Matt puts out so much info on so many different types of batteries, im lost. I guess thats a great problem to have. A abundance of choices for the future
So, if I fill a 55G drum with sand, and run wires from a solar panel into the sand, heat will be stored in the drum and can then be released and/or directed (say, into a room) by a channel of cool air?
everything sound good but how you put 500 degrees Celsius in air to water heat exchanger? What you do with air ? you lost the heated air, and what kind of heat exchangers can you find to resist this temperature?
Many houses have waterborne heat where the energy source is electric boilers, oil-fired boilers or wood-burning boilers. When these are ready for renovation, you can use sand storage of energy, together with heat pump technology and solar cells and batteries, as well as a backup solution based on a diesel-powered automated 8-10 kW generator, you will have an energy supply solution that can be used on a property and that is scalable. Then you do not need to be connected to the power grid and you hardly need to buy energy. Can be used on small detached houses, commercial buildings and apartment buildings. All these are well-established technologies with off-the-shelf components. This can be implemented in new houses and in established buildings when the time comes for renovation
In the early 1970's when oil prices tripled, a few builders used insulated foundations and 3 to 4 feet of sand in the insulated area under the house and added heat from solar water or evacuated solar water heating tubes. It was a reliable and fairly inexpensive way to store heat for days or into several weeks. The biggest decided factor in a lot of systems is affordability. For heat retention; super insulation is probably the cheapest and most reliable of all concepts. Anything else is a band-aid over an even bigger injury.
I think this is really interesting. First off, it is safe and will not directly contaminate the environment--that's huge. But I wonder if someone that has a large enough property to install a tank could use a scaled down version of this to sustain their own home through the winter. In more rural areas and in farming communities I could see this working well enough to provide plenty of heat for the winter. No?
Ok maybe I am crazy but Couldn't you run a refrigerant line/coil threw the sand as well and set up some kind of Epic scale Geo thermal heat pump to cool threw the same HVAC system you would use to distribute the hot air?
I have been fascinated with all these various battery solutions ever since I first learned of “gravity batteries” many years ago. Thanks for sharing these new approaches. Interesting stuff.
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Kindly don't forget to review the thermal solar cooling
Hey how many heat-related puns did you work in there? I lost count around half a dozen. If people downed a shot to every pun, they'd get hammered 😀
Well sand don’t work because some how we short on that. There more than one type of sand and one we need getting harder to source
You can produce Hydrogen with unwanted wind energy and burn that on demand. UK is moving to Hydrogen boilers for winter heat. Thermal batteries have been tried before and failed because the cost was 4x more expensive than renewables. See video "Billion dollar solar failure".
Why not use gravity? Dont have to mess with thermals and special materials. GRANDFATHER CLOCK style. Weight lifting on an industrial scale.
The urban farmer basically did this, but with the dirt under his greenhouse, some insulation panels, and pvc pipes. It worked really well at keeping his greenhouse temperature consistent, even throughout Canadian winter.
Can you share a link, plz?
@@-delilahlin-1598 this is the timelapse, but he's got other videos describing what he did
th-cam.com/video/88kBvz8lVVg/w-d-xo.html
Here's a pretty good overview of the urban farmers new setup
th-cam.com/video/von7IxA7uQc/w-d-xo.html
Someone complained that the earth will eventually have sand shortage, but that's only an issue for sand used in construction that needs a certain type of quality. The sand battery can use any type of sand, e.g. desert sand that doesn't qualify for construction.
When river sand runs out, the sand in demand, they will find a way to process desert sand to become fine like river sand. Just a matter of rolling it around in a cement mixer for a while, I bet.
and wait...yeah isn't the world already suffering a massive sand shortage?
@@TheBooban I was gonna mention river sand. I live in kansas city missouri and the river barges are constantly running for river sand as far as I know.
Imagine having one unit that heated your home and water supply at the same time 😳 that's gonna get somebody on a disappearance conspiracy list 🤔 👀
Ur all bloody morons. Electricity storage is just idiocy! Oil gas and nuclear is the only way to meet the world's increasing energy crisis. If ppl want more electric vehicles we need more plants to produce it! Storage and windfarms ain't gonna even come close
@@TheBooban yes and that's such an efficient use of limited electricity 🙄 do u ppl have brains in ur heads at all?
I did this same thing in my shop up here in Alaska, we had to back fill within the confines of a large poured concrete foundation. I bought a semi truck load of blue foam that was being torn off of a high school roofing project and insulated what I call a thermal or dirt battery. as we back filled and compacted with sand and gravel we layered in PEX tubing, in the top strata of the dirt we laid a top grid of potable pex tubes to preheat the water going into my indirect fired water heater. I am currently charging the dirt battery with evacuated tube solar collectors, the whole thing is charged with glycol to keep it from freezing in the winter months. The system works quite well, we have almost 24 hour daylight in the summer and no heat load, so the system stores energy all summer as well as preheating my domestic hot water. The dimensions of the system are 36' x 36' by about 8' thick. by fall the system has been running around 110 to 115 F at its warmest. in addition to preheating my potable water the system can pull heat out with the same Pex that it uses to put it in and heat the shop and house radiant with the low temps. the system has been running almost maintenance free for seven years now and I have plans to double the collectors and have already built a 2,600 gallon tank into the foundation to use as my high temp battery, hoping to run this one around 180 to 200 F. to answer the question I know everyone is asking it has cut by gas consumption in half over the course of a year. almost 100% in the summer and increasing and decreasing amounts in the shoulder seasons.
This is the most promising technology you’ve presented lately….it doesn’t rely on “a miracle occurs here”. Everything needed to make this work exists today.
This is a perfect solution for college campuses or other places where they have a central heating system for multiple buildings!!! It doesn’t need to start with entire cities!! This is one of the most wise and PRACTICAL energy solutions I’ve seen in ages!! If there’s enough sun to make it work in Finland, they can use it almost anywhere!!
He had a map that showed MN. U of M has/had a huge steam plant; I am going to have to research where in MN that sand storage is...😃
No rare minerals or metals needed for these storage options are honestly the most important part. This is truly a scalable. This along with the Co2 batteries seem like they could work great in tandem.
No it is not scalable! Ur all such gullible retards sry not sry
I'm curious if this could be scaled down to be used for residential batteries / heat storage, and for off grid systems. You could probably remove the inefficiencies of converting power by using fresnel lenses to super heat air during the day / summer. And use it to heat the house during the night... I'm curious what type of insolation and size would be needed to store enough mass to make a difference.
That was also my first thought. Would be pretty interesting to see if it can be scaled down to single-home use. Looks mechanically-simple too, so it might even be possible to DIY.
Edit: I just realized that this would be amazing for people living in more rural areas. For example, my grandma lives in Serbia, and over there it's still normal to use wood fires to heat your home, at least in the more rural places (which is pretty much everything outside of Belgrade and a few other cities). Her house has water radiators connected to a central furnace in the basement over copper pipes. She used to have to use wood logs, but we've upgraded her to a wooden pellet system a few years ago. Which is great, because now she doesn't have to build a fire and can just press a button. But a sand battery would still be a massive improvement. The pipes are already there, and I am sure there would be a way to connect them to a sand battery, and then she wouldn't have to worry about keeping wood pellets in stock
I'm something like that could be cooked up (with help of thermal pumps). But there are actually better options, as in geothermal pump for heating.. .and run it the other way during summer months (so cool the building and dump the excess heat into the same ground used for heating during colder spells). That has been done in some commercial (office/shopping mall) buildings, and it is not too costly if the foundations require a lot of pile driving anyway (piles make a good thermal mass).
Naturally the heating and cooling needs to be designed so that they can be done. Retrofitting such a system might be quite spendy, less so for new builds. Using a higher temp minimized sand thermal battery might be easier to retrofit into existing residential buildings, but there is often a critical mass required when the heat loss is acceptable. Too small, and it won't hold the "heat" to be economically viable.
I like both the ideas presented here.
there's a number of thermal store products available on the UK market
It would be interesting to dump waste heat from other home appliances into a thermal storage unit like this. For example your air conditioner and refrigerator both dump the heat they pull from the area they are cooling into the environment as waste heat. If that hot air could be pushed through a heat battery first it could add energy that would normally be lost. It would probably not be enough heat by itself, but it would just be wasted otherwise.
Matt I just want to say thank you, I’ve been watching your videos for a couple months now and you have completely changed the way I think about sustainability. Your scripts are so well thought out and your articulation makes complex ideas simply to comprehend. Definitely my most anticipated TH-cam videos I wait to be uploaded, thank you for the effort, time and knowledge you share with us
I appreciate that!
Me too, can't wait to see how you take advantage of it in your home build, so excited to watch those future videos.
So sad for you Darren
Sorry not sorry but no no no! The problem causing all u kids stupidity these days is getting ur info from idiotz on TH-cam! But FYI most of this video is completely wrong and false information! The reason ur all so thick in America is because u think Google and TH-cam are feeding u the facts but they are not!
@@northstar32v8 I second this 👌
I made a sand heat store for my wood burning stove. Keeps giving up heat for about 20+ hours after the stove has gone out. Also has water heat store to pump around the radiators when the temp drops too much. This allows me to do a fairly short burn in the evenings. Also I burn it at a much higher temp than I normally would which makes for a much more efficient and complete combustion of the fuel. It will allow for expansion to use solar thermal or pv for heating the water tank to make up for the heating shortfall on cooler days in the summer (I live in the uk). With the energy prices going up so fast here it really is making people think how to make their homes more efficient.
I'd love to see a video of this if you wouldn't mind please
Me too. I'd also like to see.
Thanks!
This is yet another reminder that more cities need to invest in district heating networks. This is one of many potential techs out there which would drastically reduce emissions by taking advantage of one….but many of our cities don’t have district heating so they won’t be able to take advantage of it :-(
@Li Heli sure. These systems require upkeep. But paying for that upkeep via taxes is rarely as expensive as when you tally up all the upkeep that us individuals pay on our own little private systems. So we still win as a group overall.
But we have to get the messaging right in order to help people realize that deploying something like this may raise your taxes, and that’s actually a good thing.
Detroit HAD district heating from coal fired electric plants. Then we started phasing out the old and dying coal plants and they sold the district heating to Enron. Which raised prices for heat to high cost and for 2+ years a goodly portion of Detroit's central heat district scrambled to convert to gas fired boilers (3 year payback on package boilers vs Enron)(steam was the medium for transfer and Detroit was the "condenser" for the power plants - adsorption cooling for the summer).
So, if building managers are going to buyin and this is going to work, it must be regulated and treated as a utility or some structure to avoid the gouging as Enron did to cause a reversal effect.
Given the efficiencies of heat pumps, the power grid has the capability of being a very efficient district heating network.
@@DominicFalcon You suggesting collecting the excess heat from transformers and other power grid equipment and feed that into district heating system?
@@DominicFalcon The point of the video was, that you still need electricity for it to work (relating to heatpumps) and in current market, there are too few cheap and scaleable options for renewables to store excess energy during the peak production hours and disperse it in form of an electricity. I.e. the problem is that you need more diverse forms of energy exchange rather than straight up electro-chemical batteries for energy storage. Heat pumps are a great solution only if your source of energy is nuclear or hydro (easy to adjust and to throttle).
Using unrecyclable brown or green glass, powered, for the sand would also create a use for the material instead of sending it to a landfill. Using glass instead of sand would also keep the glass out of the waste stream. And the glass has the same properties for high heat storage as sand.
Excellent idea! (Also, I don't think a lot of people know that brown and green glass are not recyclable).
There is a start-up in New Orleans that is recycling glass back into sand. they pulverise it till it is the size of sand grains. certain coloured glasses blue, red and green they turn into ornamental sand for use in gardens and architectural uses and the rest they use to help restore coastal wetlands with the help of an environmental organisation restoring wetlands around New Orleans to help mitigate damage from hurricanes. So far the results look promising with all testing showing the product is environmentally safe and the local plants happily spreading into the new sand banks.
@@JustWasted3HoursHere do you have any sources for this? I only know you can not mix brown and green into white, but they are fine if they are not mixed and it is not so much a problem for brown and green. Or is this a local thing because where you live other colours are used for those glasses?
Edit: Ok, i also just found out the USA only recycles about 33% of glass while Germany does 84% (we use much green and brown) and Slovenia even 99%. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_recycling
Why would colored glass not be recyclable? We do. Just use it for something other than clear glass production.
@@zapfanzapfan
This is the glass that can't be recycled
Any glass mixed with other materials.
Decorative glass.
Mixed-color glass.
Dirty glass or glass caked with food waste.
Ceramics or dishware.
Pyrex and other types of heat-resistant glass.
Window glass
Mirrors
Crystal
Light bulbs
Computer or television screens
Cathode-ray tubes
In Finland we have district heating in every major city and it's absolutely awesome. So cheap and efficient. This sand storage seems super promising due to it's simplicity. I hope those sand heat storage systems get deployed in every Finnish city soon. We could send excess renewable power into those immediately while we simultaneously ramp up electrochemical and mechanical energy storage.
Ahem, we would need at least 50MW of heat per hour minimum in bigger cites. That's a lot of sand of you wanna power the system, let's say for a week.
@@happylatino Apparently many Finnish cities are looking into smaller scale nuclear power (SMR/MMR) for powering those systems instead of coal or biomass, which are the most common heat sources.
This can still be utilized by nuclear Cogen plants. Just store heat when not needed, liberate it when needed. For conversion into electricity its ridiculously inneficient.
This type of storage is far too low density, 8MWh is what you'd need for a single house to call it seasonal. The government will waste some tax money on it and other useless projects and thus we pave the path to hell with good intentions.
They might be looking into those but smr won't ever happen with current legislation. It's far to strict. And secondly nuclear will not power district heating without electricity conversion first
It's interesting what Sri lanka can do as here the country is so warm almost everyday, and we have plenty of sun as well. we can use solar panels and store all the heat in these silos, and then use them steadily by connecting them to the grid. our whole power outage problem will go away.
Definitely has a chance of catching on!
This could also help greenhouse installations and prevent the need for extra heating with gas during colder seasons.
If the materials for this installation are this freely available, silo-builders, now working for farmers that wish to store grains or other crop, could easily diversify to these large batteries!
For heat storage the theory is really simple: Surface area increases by the second power, but volume increases by the third power. So, for example, the surface area of a sphere is 4 * pi *r ^2 while its volume is (4/3) * pi * r^3. The ability for sand or any medium to retain heat is primarily a function of this ratio... the only way to lose the heat in the storage medium is through its surface area. So scale winds up being very important. The bigger the storage medium, the more efficiently it can store heat.
The problems are many, though. All heat storage devices have thermal expansion and contraction stresses so a daily cycle can really be quite harsh on the infrastructure. In other-words, maintenance can wind up being a relatively large component of the operating cost. Particularly if major portions of the device are inaccessible (aka sand battery). Liquid (e.g. syrup consistency) based systems are far easier to maintain because no internal structures are required... you just pump the liquid through a loop just like a heat-pump water heater does. Phase-change materials that go between liquid and gas are even better because the energy density is typically far higher.
It will be interesting to see how these progress, but it is a fairly tall order to compete against battery technologies which can be produced in GWh volumes and get cheaper and cheaper every year.
Wrong!
I wonder if these batteries could be kept underground.
they don't heat it up everyday
There is a surface area at which the heat loss (no matter how well insulated) begins to increase, so that is a limiting factor.
@@timgurr1876 Surface area limiting factor only matters in how small the system can be and still be efficient enough for use, there is literally no limiting factor in how big the system can be, other than the materials used to build the sand holding. The bigger the system, the more efficient in storing the heat.
This seems like a great option for energy storage. However, I see a greater problem in the U.S.A., we are not insulating our homes to be efficient. In my area, they are still building stick homes without an exterior insulation wrap. Better insulation means less heating and cooling in the first place. Cheers
Exaclty, first thing i ask people, are you warmer when you wrap yourself in a coat, or are you warmer by cutting the coat into strips and stuffing between your ribs. They tend to come to correct conclusion all on their own lmfao
My son did a science project in the 8th grade, comparing roof construction to solar gain. We found that roofs heat houses thru radiation. Radiant heat barriers prevent 90% of room heating. Radiant heat barriers are cheap and super easy to install during new construction. I asked a friend who is an engineer for large housing projects if they were using radiant heat barriers, he'd never heard of it. My main garage, here in Florida is too hot to work in during the summer. So i'm installing radiant heat barriers, a challenging project in my house with a very low attic, I can barely sit in it under the peak of the roof. So you're 100% correct.
Here in Ireland our houses have good insulation but have no air conditioning, which is a real problem with the summers getting hotter lol
This is more an issue of local building codes, but I agree. All new builds here in Ontario have to be wrapped with insulation now
I agree. The building codes in America are horribly written. They heavily favor developer-friendly, box style "McHomes", not longevity, good living, or comfort. The insulation is grossly inadequate.
This reminds me of the off-peak storage heater we had in the UK in the 60s. It used cheap electricity at night to heat up bricks in the heater and then released the energy slowly throughout the day to heat the house. The storage time was clearly quite limit, but it's the same basic principal. The efficiency was 100%. In the future, with an excess of solar energy during the day, it could be used to store energy for use at night when there is clearly no solar energy production.
Sounds simple and effective. Wonder why it didn’t catch on if was used in the 60’s.
"The efficiency was 100%."
Doubt.
@@LongWindedUsername Electricity moving through wires generates heat as a byproduct, so as a result, electricity-to-heat conversions are 100% efficient conversions. As such, electricity to heat brick, then brick to heat home is as near-100% efficiency as you can possibly get.
@@LongWindedUsername exactly... there is not such thing as 100% efficiency... not even in science fiction such as star trek did their engines get 100%
@@TheBooban This system is still used today - mostly in flats I would think, but I bought a house just a few years ago that only had this system of storage radiators plus one coal fire. I also have two flats that use this system. It is very much alive in Britain.
I love this. Sand is so plentiful. I know stones were used as heat storage in earth buried ovens thousands of years ago. I personally have dug stones days later from a large fire pit only to find they are still very very warm. I wonder if you can skip the above ground storage and just dig deep enough where there is natural insulation, or would that be too much direct thermal conduction with the surrounding earth?
You would still want to insulate it, but it would be a good idea for particularly chilly climates. Going down just a handful of feet the ground evens out the temperature evens out to ~50°F, a trick used by geothermal heat pumps. A air heat pump can work to heat one’s house in negative temperatures, but it’s more efficient at higher temperatures, same goes for insulation.
The issue with using hot air heating instead of steam heating, is that the specific heat of Steam is 1.996 kJ/kgK while the specific heat of Air is between 1 and 1.2 kJ/kgK. That means that Steam carries at least twice the energy per unit (mass temp) than air, and some sources say that it can be up to 4 times. That's not even taking into account the heat transfer coefficients of steam vs. air. Air is a decent insulator, that means it's not nearly as good at transferring heat as other substances; meaning that you're either going to have to push more hot air through the system to get the same heating effect as with steam, or the heating will be less. Either way, it's not nearly as efficient as the steam it would be replacing.
i dont know why it couldn't be anything they wanted to push into the system. i dont see why it would have to be air, its like a hot pipe
Wouldn't the square-cube-law work in our favour here? Just scale it up massively and have lots of storage volume for not a lot of surface area over which heat can escape by comparison. Or what is the limiting factor?
The limiting factor would be the size of the area of that usable thermal energy. This works great in the narrow example of areas that will intermittently produce excess heat and alternately need more heat than they're producing on site over a span of less than a few months, but once you need to move that heat offsite over any appreciable distance, the lack of capable enough insulation compounded over distance would cause massive losses in energy in the piping; this is why you probably have your own water heater and don't pay for a hot water line from across town.
@@mtnbkr5478 In fact, our district heating works like that - there is cold water supply to the houses, part of the fresh water is heated in a heat exchanger - so yes, we buy hot water from across town, sort of :-)
@@pohjoinenkala9301 I knew that there are some areas where that's a thing, but I'm not very familiar with it. How large of an area can they handle?
@@mtnbkr5478 In Helsinki, the whole town is covered by DH, the length of the piping is some 1300 kms. They offer heating and cooling too :-)
@@pohjoinenkala9301 That's pretty impressive. I was originally thinking that there would be a lot of energy lost in moving heat over a large area like that, but if the system is constant and well insulated it would make sense that those losses would be minimized. Thank you!
This is a genius idea. Even if it can be used only for heating direcly, it still *indirectly* saves electricity that otherwise would be used for heating.
Tried before with super insulated underground "septic" tanks and water as a medium back in the 70's.
Dunkelflaute will be easier to deal with if they have these.
I think it's dead on arrival, they might get one or two built. Resistance heating has low capital cost but otherwise it's a waste.
@@FrancisKoczur The hottest achieved with a heat pump is 356 F. The key to this is thinking about what you are trying to optimize. In this case, capacity and capital costs to handle dunkelflaute. You may not need to cycle this thing much. Also, hopefully, the resistive heater is very cheap, so you can use overproduction, or at least cheap power. This will never displace batteries, but batteries are expensive for occasionally used capacity.
@@FrancisKoczur Resistance heating is simple, proven, and reliable, with very low TCO.
6:00 Small note on this point. Russian gas has NEVER played a big role in heating Finnish homes. In 2020 natural gas had 6% share of total energy consumption in Finland. In 2020 renewables also surpassed fossil fuels in the total energy consumption.
How did their renewable systems pop into existence? Manual labor, or was fossil fuel energy involved? You have to count the fossil inputs (mining, smelting, manufacture, transport, installation, maintenance, etc. of the "renewable" system) else "sustainable" is just a marketing trick wave breaking against a sea wall of sluggish minds. There's a point where *some* renewable systems break even, then start producing a net gain. Some. Most break before they ever get to that elusive zero-point. After that point, yay! But, it's unlikely (m)any of your renewable systems have broken even yet, and until that point, you'd have been better off burning the dino squeezins, or saving them for fertilizers, pesticides, tires, pharmaceuticals, and surgical tubing. It's difficult to do, but one must count every joule of Flintstones energy input, and subtract it from the purple-hair-new-age output before a truly legit smug can ensue. It does occasionally happen, but it's never a given as so many ignorant people presume. Confidence games are complex on purpose, and con game victims are always incredibly lazy (or emotional) thinkers. Be the skeptic/scientist instead.
The biggest question i have about this technology was barely touched on
How can they insulate that sand tank ?
Keeping sand at 600°C for months ?
This seems unfeasible to me
I watched a bunch of vids on this and did a tad bit of research and...this is easy and actually achievable in most areas..hopefully this tech takes off to help power our future...thumbs up
You and Dave from Just Have a Think are overlapping on quite a few videos recently. Both doing a great job nevertheless...! Keep it up!
Yeah, we tend to cross paths a lot on these topics. Same with TwoBitDavinci ... I believe he's going to be covering this topic too very soon.
Sure, it is nice to see different points of view in the new technologies, Matt with the USA market and Dave with the British/Europe side of thing...but it would be nice to have somebody covering in every continent, specially in Africa or South America and see how such technologies would shape a less developed environment.
@@UndecidedMF "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery," but I saw it here first. Good job! I'm a long-time subscriber.
I think I could save a lot of electricity if I try to implement something like this for my home heating in the winter and maybe my water heating year round. No electricity needed probably if I heat with lots of mirrors during the warmest part the day on a high-heat absorbant surface of the tank and then insulate that whole thing during the night, and I have all the sand I need in my immediate area. I just need to build an insulated tank with a thermally conductive section that I can seal up easily
I did not realize that sand Towers like that could hold so much heat. I would think the heat would dissipate after a few months. Love to see more info on it. Good idea
That's so true. I live in the tropics and during the day you can barely step on it. Especially our sand which mostly has a lot of iron. I wonder how iron rich sand works.
@@renviluan2842 probably works best ferrous metals hold heat best right?
I would be interested in you covering some of the older more localized heat storage systems. In the uk as a kid we had large boxes in many homes that were full of bricks. The bricks would get heated during off peak electrical usage. I also recall an air conditioning system that froze a cube of water off peak and then used that block of ice to help cool during peak heat.
In the old days there were also the heat magazine stove(or however it translates to English.). It had a huge core of iron that was kept heated all day with electricity and when the need came for cooking you could use up all that stored heat.
It was in the time when electricity was metered by the line capacity and not the energy usage and so it was most economical for households to have a constant electricity use throughout the day.
YES AWESOME
Here in Scandinavia we are already having at times fully wind powered countries like Denmark. In coming years we are going to be at times swamped by huge excess of wind born electricity. All over Scandinavia. Finns, Swedes and Norwegians have the space for farms that no-one needs to hear or see, and we really do have wind most of the year. Way to industrial scale store that excess energy might be right there.
Nice summary of the technology - like many great ideas, it's impressively simple. Couple of points:
1) Resistive heating is a good thing to start with, since it's cheap and simple. But 100% efficient is actually not that good! Heat pumps can get >300% efficiency for heating. But they're more expensive, more complicated, and I'm not sure if they can reach anywhere near the temperatures needed.
2) Water can be used at much greater than 100°C as superheated steam, under high pressure. That's the technology all big fossil fuel and nuclear power stations use to move heat around and to drive the turbine. It's also what this company is using to transfer heat out of the sand. And why it's all off-the-shelf parts.
300% efficiency...congrats bro, you just invented eternal engine
@@vygag Welcome to the interesting world of thermodynamics:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump
"With 1 kWh of electricity, they can transfer 3 to 6 kWh of thermal energy into a building"
@@markmuir7338 damn, thats really eternal engine, pair it with steam turbine, a billions worth idea
@@vygag It's a 200 year old idea, and is already a multi-billion dollar industry. All refrigerators and air conditioners use this concept. The key point is that a heat pump doesn't create heat - it simply moves it from one place to another. So it's not really >100% efficient - it's just cheating by solving a different problem. But happily for most uses of heat, we don't care if the heat was created or simply moved from somewhere else.
How well does desert sand compare to refuse construction sand from an insulator perspective? More dense, more insulation?
ive pondered the same question for months now. after hearing matts explanation on the topic i think contruction sand maybe more energy dense if they are choosing leftover construction material over its cheaper and more abundant desert counter part. but equaly it could be minimal and a choice made for waste reduction.
Awesome, appreciate the thoughts! Certainly agree going local makes sense - kinda thinking through what materials have no current market around the world and where solar plants are located. Could see this being ported for solar plants, seems cheaper that molten salts. Assuming temps are not high enough to drive turbines?
Yes, I believe sand batteries can be a good heat storage medium. Even if a tower collapsed (ex. in an earthquake) there's no real environmental damage; just wait for the sand to cool and rebuild the tower.
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One minor correction: water "can" exceed 212F/100C, when under pressure (albeit not by a lot). That's how a pressure canner works. At 15psi, a pressure canner gets water up to 240F/116C.
Small correction around the 9:30 mark - Water can be heated above 100C, and is often heated beyond that. High pressure can raise the boiling point of water to a fairly high amount. You probably don’t want to pipe high pressure hot water beyond a facility, as high temperature steam is scary stuff, but for energy storage as long as you have a pressure vessel (ie boiler) you can heat water beyond 100C without it boiling.
Thank you. I was going to make a similar remark since we already have systems above that threshold.
Yes water can be heated above the boiling point under pressure, but that would greatly add to the complexity and cost of energy storage.
You mentioned that they obtain a high round trip efficiency of near 100% by using resistance heaters, however don't heat pumps deliver much more heat energy for a given input of electrical energy? I'm pretty sure the reasoning for this is that heat pumps take heat from the environment and simply move it rather than convert the electrical energy directly into heat. Meaning you can effectively obtain efficiencies even greater than 100% in terms of heat energy delivered over electrical energy consumed. I think this avoids violations in thermodynamics as the conversion from heat to electrical energy would be inherently less efficient meaning you don't create net energy in the process.
This video and articles about batteries all have the same problem, they never mention that that they add cost to your electric bill and our focus should be on renewables that do NOT need batteries first.
To make solar and wind energy reliable you have to greatly over build what you would need because it doesn't produce all the time and use massive battery backup systems to capture energy when it is producing for use later. They never include the cost of overbuilding and the battery systems when they tell you it's cheaper.
Batteries cost money to build, to maintain, and batteries wear out and need to be replaced. Batteries are not 100% efficient so when you charge a battery you do NOT get all the power back. So, in the end batteries add cost to your electric bill but are a necessary evil to make wind and solar reliable. Pumped hydro and sand work just like a battery and has the same problems as batteries do. The EPA calls pumped hydro a negative renewable because it uses more energy than it makes.
What would be better than wind, solar, batteries? Geothermal power which is also a renewable and it works 24 hours a day, week after week, month after month just like coal, natural gas, and nuclear.
Geothermal and Biomass/Biogas should always be looked at first to see if it is a good fit for your location. If it is not, then look at solar and wind just realize it's NOT cheaper.
WOW! :D Amazing video Matt! Thanks! We are planning to make a trigeneration product where we could turn heat back to electricity in places where there is large heat consumption also, like DH network. Then it doesn't matter if electrical efficiency is 25% because you can but the rest to DH network from the turbine condenser. Actually that also is basic stuff here with "combined heat and power" CHP plants.
I think you could use this to heat your home. You wouldn't need a large scale application for a single family home. A solar furnace isn't that difficult to build. The heated sand would allow for a longer period of heating after the sun sets.
Agreed... We need to de-centralize most services water, sanitation, electricity, heating, etc., giving people independence. Also, when there is a system failure it only effects 1 household not thousands!
@@onestoptechnologies7305 i have to disagree. The scale associated with centralizing energy systems brings huge efficiency gains compared to home scale systems (internal combustion generator ~30%, gas or coal power plant ~40-50%). In addition, the investment costs divided by the amout of people that are served are much lower with industrial scale power. And as for reliability, much of it is down to a proper funding scheme either not funneling money to corporate or municipal operators not skimping on costs. I have lived in a district heated home my whole life, and so does half of the population of finland, my home country, in both single family homes and units. There has never been an outage that has affected my life and as long as i have followed the news has there never been a story about a district heating outage. And as far as electrical power, there has never in my life been an outage in the cities. Rural areas sometimes see some homes go without for a few hours if a tree falls on the line, but cities have roughly 100% underground electrical power lines. Never any system wide failures like in texas 2021 either, and our grid has more wind than texas and has a colder climate.
In short, if the central system is not reliable, one should rather invest into if and fund it well rather than abandon it in favour of small scale power.
@@otsokivivuori7726 I can understand why one might think it would be "better." However, efficiency is not the "be-all and end-all." Unfortunately, I have seen power outages cause deaths. In the last 2 years alone, almost 1,000 people died in just the State of Texas.
Finland is 29 times smaller than the USA and only 720 miles long, so transmission loss is less of a factor. 97% of the USA is considered "Rural," yet still contains nearly 20% of the population (60 million.... 12x the population of Finland). It's not uncommon to be able to drive for hours without seeing a stop sign while passing many homes. In the USA, we have transmission lines that were installed for the purpose of transporting electricity more than 1,200 miles from hydroelectric sources in the North to population centers in the hot areas of the South. Interestingly, you comment about Finland being "colder" that Texas... power transmission is better in cold conditions than hot.
Computer systems migrated from the "Centralized Computing Model" to the "De-Centralized Computing Model" we have today. Most systems today are designed the concept of "Lots of Little." Distributed versus Centralized. Even the "centralized" systems you are lauding, are not truly centralized... (One single power generator for the entire country.) They still have de-centralized power generators throughout the country, so the real question is just about where to draw the line... Country?, City?, Neighborhood?, Home?
Most "Life and Safety" systems are required to be localized and independent because they are so important. It might be more efficient to centralize all food preparation and eliminate all kitchens in homes; no cooking fires, no untrained people preparing food, less food illness, but would that really be better? Governments throughout history have implemented many "efficient" solutions but rarely are they the better for the people.
I've never heard someone describe any government led venture as monetarily "efficient." Governments do not have their own money... they just take money from the people and spend it. I can assure you that individuals will spend their own money in more effective and judicious ways than ANY bureaucracy.
The USA was built upon self-reliance and self-sufficiency, coupled with concern for our fellow man. Individual States that are United! I think we are better versions of ourselves when we grow from children who are helpless and dependent, to adults that are knowledgeable and independent.
Small solar systems augmented with an additional diversified source and local storage encourages people to be more mindful of their energy usage, very scalable with demand and eliminates massive transmission losses. If your neighbor loses power, you can go help them or invite them into your home until it's fixed... instead of freezing to death right next door.
I think it's a brilliant idea...when attending the University of Toronti, I discovered that all the buildings on the main campus were heated by steam piped from a single heat-producing building - it would certainly make sense to convert that system to this sand- battery technology. Thank you Matt for continually sharing these important ideas!
Just noticed your channel has surpassed 1 million subscribers! Such a great channel more than deserving of those numbers. Keep up the good work.
If converting electrical energy into heated air, why not use a heat pump instead of a resistive coil to be even more efficient?
Honestly, I find it hard to believe that a steel cylinder storage container can retain the heat of the hot sand of 600°C for 6 months until the winter arrives.
I live close to a outdoor skiing area. During the late winter, snow is gathered and created during the last cold weeks into a huge pile of snow maybe a 100m long and 20m tall. It is covered in wood chips and left there for the whole summer season, to be used to kickstart the next season of skiing. The snow holds surprisingly well and a reduction in size of the covered snow pile is not really noticable. The thermal mass of these big dense storages is not too be underestimated when the surface area is so small.
@@leonardschoyen oh wow I didnt know that! Thats interesting!
But whats your usual temperature there? See if snow is around 0°C and the ambient temperature is around 25°C then the difference is 25 and that affects the rate of heat transfer. Here it seems like the difference would be around 600-25=575°C which means the rate of heat transfer is much higher. If i recall correctly from high school physics that is, the higher the difference in temperature the faster the rate of change.
@@StormyMusic9 It's true that the heat transfer is proportional to the difference in heat, but it is also only proportional to the surface area of the shape (the square of the length). The heat carrying capacity is proportional with the cube of the length of the shape. A doubling of size results in 8 factor increase in carrying capacity, but only 4 factor increase in heat transfer, meaning the relative heat lost is halved, and allowing for twice the temperature differential with the same efficiency. The system showed in the video essentially amounts to a prototype, with its small size.
Congratulations Matt on your 1 million subscribers 👏
Thanks! 😃
Video starts at 6:00
Maybe a little late, and I really hope you read this comment. In the Netherlands, there is a sustainable 'village' being build at the moment. It's called ecodorp Boekel. 36 houses are going to be heated by heat produced in the summer, stored in a huge container full of steel slag and concrete, and used in the winter. The container will be heated up to 450 degrees Celsius by 600 solar panels, which should be enough energy for all 36 houses throughout the winter. The system used is called CESAR, developed by Cees van Nimwegen. You should definitely look into this development, as it's already built and in use!
I've been thinking, would it make sense to fill a room in cellar with sand for heat storage like this?
As heating bills have skyrocketed, larger houses are now cheaper than smaller ones, meaning empty space is practically free.
Interesting concept. I like that it doesn't use lithium batteries because it's tailored to a specific purpose where batteries are not necessary. But as an HVAC engineer I can't help but wonder how they insulate the tanks! It doesn't matter that much what the temperature is outside; if it's 1000°F in the tank, the difference between 90° and 40° ambient isn't much - I would expect them to be hemorrhaging heat year round. Since we're talking about storage at a seasonal level I would love to know how they address it!
That's on my mind also. I guess it doesn't much matter how much heat it loses because it's utilizing excess energy. I'd love to see the simplicity of this sand battery compared to the 5th generation cold district heating that utilizes heat pumps to extract and reject heat from a near ambient loop. My big holdup with this sand battery is the resistant heating, why go for 100% efficiency if you can have 400% efficiency in both summer and winter with heat pumps. And while it might not be as simple as sand, a massive tank of water isn't exactly much more complicated, especially when you can use it for both heating and cooling and it's already the medium being used to transport the energy throughout the heating district.
Man, I don't know why why don't put solar panels Infront of the sun like we did that telescope recently to get those photographs. The. We have solar 24/7 in one fat array and we can then lazerbeam the photons back to panels on earth to solar panels all over during nighttime by bouncing the photons off big mirrors all the way around to the dark side. Wouldn't have to hit every panel on every house. Could just hit the big huge powerplant arrays to make a large amount of solar 24/7 instead of just during the day. Sounds kinda crazy but doesn't sound kinda crazy man idk. people doing some crazy things these days
Finally, countries with a lot of sand will have an energy option.
....oh wait a sec.
Good one.
I really like this option, it's supper simple with almost no environmental risk from failure or end of life deconstruction. The only issue I can see is retrofitting it into existing infrastructure; you named a few cities in the US which have community heating systems, and a lot of further eastern European and Russian cities have that too, but in Western Europe and the UK especially there's nothing like that, so the system would have to be made from the ground up in already hugely congested underground urban environments.
It would be good to build it from scratch cause underground systems could provide water,sewage,electricity,network and heat all in the same system
Good point
One thing I wanna highlight about this kind of tech, which is the scalability of heat batteries. The amount of thermal energy depends on the material, and also very importantly, its mass. Mass is a result of volume. On the other hand the heat lost to surrounding is based on the temperature difference and the surface area.
As you make the battery bigger, the mass goes up by dimension cubed while the surface area expands only by dimension squared.
The bigger the battery is, the more efficient it becomes. And when going big, its worth it to find cheap but dense materials.
No limitations on specific elements, no limitations of geography, just dump as much stuff into the tank and time to go
same idea on engei running on petrol and diesel , as much biger you get as much efficient you will be .
My smallholding has sand and gravel beneathe the topsoil.....LOTS of it. I'm going to dig an area out, heavily insulate the void, return the dried sand with internal heat deposit and retrieval infrastructure, then use a dedicated PV system to run it. A game changer that uses what I already have!
Heating the sand could be made even more efficient with a heat pump, instead of using a resistive heating element. Yes, you can have greater than 100% efficiency. The main benefit I could see of using a resistive heating element, is lower maintenance and production costs, as well as a longer lifespan. But figuring out which heating method is better in this application is more complicated math than I can do.
I think this kind of battery would be useful in key locations where a facility of some kind produces a lot of waste heat, and happens to be close to an area that heating is in demand. Perhaps a mid-scale bakery could store waste heat in such a battery during operational hours, to be used during the entire day and night, acting as a capacitor for heat.
If this sand battery is kept small enough in scale, it could potentially be combined with more of itself by hooking them up in series. That way, if the attached facility is decommissioned, the sand batteries can be salvaged and moved somewhere else, allowing them to be reused.
Exactly! Why not use a heat pump to put the heat in? If the point is to use it in the summer, then it will be helped by the higher outside temperature.
@@manveroo1340 Ah! Thanks to you calling it a heat pump, I realized I called it the wrong thing. I used accidentally used heat exchanger instead of heat pump. (A heat exchanger may be a part of a heat pump, but it doesn't actually concentrate heat, it facilitates the flow of concentrated heat to an area of less concentrated heat, in a manner planned for by the engineer.) I'll edit it.
And yes, the heat pump would be good in relatively warm environments. Environments like Earth. Because even the coldest biomes on Earth are a good deal warmer than absolute zero. Assuming you are concentrating heat from the environment, then the closer the ambient heat is to your target temperature, the more efficient the heat pump will be.
A resistive heating element may still be useful at the very upper end of the heat range for what the sand battery is capable of holding. I'm not sure if a heat pump can operate at the same upper temperature limits as a heating element.
@@World_Theory You won´t get the same temps as resistive heating, if heat pumps could pump out 600°C temperature all our problems would be solved instantly. What heat pumps would need is a different gas to compress and decompress
@@GunniGST Mmm, okay. That answers a question I had on my mind.
There’s this other method that’s pretty good at producing a lot of very green energy:
Nuclear power
HELL YA
Anakin don't approve 🏜
Only thing better than a squirrel chasing a ball is a bunny with a pancake on his head. They add amazing quality to your post.
Like if you understand this inside joke.
This tech could be incorporated into parking garages. Those are just large concrete heat sinks that gather heat during the summer and that heat just dissipates without being used for anything. Driveways, sidewalks, and streets and highways can also be added. Streets and highways can also have piezoelectric elements into them that turns the normal use flexing into electricity. (Yeah, the average street or freeway does go thru minor flexing due to normal traffic usage and expansion/contraction due to heat differentials. It's not visible to the eye until after the cracks start forming.)
I got excited and crimped some nichrome wire to an XT60 connector and put it in a box of playground sand and plugged that in to my 100W solar panel. The nichrome worked great, I even got a little burn on my finger.
The playground sand has two issues though... it doesn't conduct the heat to the rest of the sand from around the heating element... and it doesn't retain that heat (I checked it one hour after the solar panel was shaded.)
I see from other comments that quartz sand is preferred.... will try this. I'd love to have a place where my cat can sit outside during the winter.
Similar to some of my other comments on your excellent videos, biochar and pyrolysed hydrochar (650-800 deg C) could be used instead of sand and store a lot more energy. The char can also be doped or modified for storage and conductance, with the pyrolysis process generating plenty of heat. Some of the hydrochar (biocoal) and biochar could be used in natural gas broilers, which would also decarbonise steel and cement industries. The char would last longer, and when it needs to be replaced, the spent char could go into soils or concrete for carbon sequestration depending on the contaminant level.
District heating (kaukolämpö) is quite common in Finnish cities, so in Finland at least could be widely used.
I love that there are companies and people constantly trying to change and utilize nature to get more renewable sources of energy.
Its nice that you show something normal people can understand again
Dear @Matt thank you for a great video. I would like to add, that there are many "sand" and material times currently rated as a waste which we consider to be highly applicable as well
It makes no sense that they would use resistance heating when they could be using a heat pump and getting 4x the energy out of it. It would most likely limit the temperatures, but better to heat more material effectively than less to high temps. Multistage high temperature heat pumps could be designed though.
The surface area to volume ratio decreases with increasing size so there is less area to lose heat per volume stored by using more material potentially at lower temps vs less at higher. Also lower temps have less of a thermal gradient to drive heat transfer/loss. It may limit the use of the heat being a lower temperature, but that is already going to be limited by the whole mass cooling down over time.
Not sure about the rest of the world but in the UK we often have hot water storage tanks in our homes.
The water is heated at night when the electricity is cheaper and can be topped up as needed throughout the day if more is needed.
I think it would be great if these tanks had a sand ‘jacket’ that was heated using solar panels on the building.
It would be a great way of storing green energy for your own home without the expensive need to attach your panels to the grid. Especially as you get very little back from the supplier for each watt you supply.
You wouldn’t even need to change the hot water tank or attached heating system much as the existing system will only heat the water if it needs to. If the sand jacket was sufficient to heat the water to say 40 degrees Celsius, much less energy would be required to top it up.
I could dig up under my parking area in front of my house. Isulate that hole on the bottom and sides, fill it with sand and add some piping, and then insulate it on top. Having the heat storage sunken, you loose less heat during the winter time. On the roof of the parking area there could be solar panels. The extra energy, not used during the day, gets converted into heating the sand, from under the driveway. During the evening, when the panels do not produce, use the stored heat in the sand under the driveway to heat the house. Did I get all this right?
I love the idea of harvesting energy and using it in the same form, rather than converting it multiple times, it just makes sense and i hope we will see more of that kind of thinking in the energy industry and for all the engineering challenges that we are facing today.
Literally storing the sun's summer heat for winter is a great idea. I dont know why we havent thought of it sooner.
I like it! I do wonder why the heating element aren't embedded in the sand itself.
I can see the advantage of keeping this above-ground as it makes installation trivial. But this could also be stored underground, and reduce the need for insulation.
I love these kind of technology, simple, cheap, sustainable, environmentally friendly and no waste.
How do they insulate the heated sand from the surrounding environment?
You forgot to ask a few important question.. what is used as a heat transfer fuild to and from the battery to achive temperatures of 1200 as most oil will burn up at high temperatures... molt salts will not flow untill temp achived... what material are used to insulate this heat storage.
About the stopped windmills. I travel from Phoenix to San Diego regularly. The vast majority of the stopped windmills are in need of repair. Went to SD 3 weeks ago and it was obvious that several had caught fire and that's just what you can see driving by. Almost all the first generation (12-15yrs ago) are not working because their wing edges have deteriorated so much that it takes a hurricane wind to make them turn. Some have been stopped for a few years now so I'm guessing it is just too expensive to fix them.
I think there is some confusion going on here, there is no way to pipe hot water or heat directly to where it is needed, the heat has to be converted back into electricity to be transmitted over wires and then used to create heat at the destination, so this doesn't in any way address the need for heat in a factory miles away or homes nearby. A heat battery would have to be located at each and every place the heat is needed to directly apply the heat to some sort of application.
I have question: On tropical country, Cold water is needed. Can we use this technology to pump a cooler water temperature (7 deg Celsius) to the sand silo then utilitize this stored cooler water supply.
How would you propose cooling the sand and how low temp can sand become?
@@markhathaway9456 th-cam.com/video/0rzQhSXVq60/w-d-xo.html. The chiller machine will cool the water and pump it to the sand because in my opinion maybe sand has high thermal inertia characteristics that's why it can keep storing hot temperature for a longer time. I think maybe it can store colder temperature too. This is only my opinion you can correct if I have flaws and mistakes in my thoughts.
Minor correction: You said Russia cut gas. This is true, but in Finland, very few actually use gas for heating. We use electricity, oil, coal etc. but very little natural gas. Finland was not really affected by the cut. Germany, on the other hand, was affected a lot.
So what's the feasibility of taking an existing indirect water heater tank and turning it into a sand battery? Indirect water heaters already have heat exchanger coils for water running through them and these water tanks are designed for thermal storage of water. Water is not potentially as hot as the sand, so maybe the current materials used for these devices is not up to the task, but if it works, you could put one of these into every home and make it work with existing heating systems.
What about black sand( aka iron oxides) which is abundant and can be extracted with a electomagnetic field. Has a higher melting point and would hold heat longer, just as easy to get 🤔. Definitely worth looking into. 👌
One thing not discussed is the considerable loss in efficiency that results from using resistive heating rather than a heat pump. Heat pumps effectively reduce energy needs for heating by a factor of 3 to 5. That efficiency boost is lost with this method. You could potentially use heat pumps for the initial storage, but this drastically increases the complexity. You would also likely need multi-stage pumps to achieve the desired temperatures.
My town has a huge heat storage that uses water.
But the electric heating and silo shape is something they share.
It takes excess renewable energy and supplements the city heating system.
Thus it cuts down on gas and coal use.
City? What part of country?
@@troubleshooter1975 North
Do you think the cold counterpart could be done for use in areas where heating is not as needed? Like refrigerating a bunch of sand with the excess energy and have it be insulated against getting warm. Then the cool air could get distributed to a metropolitan area.
I wonder if heat storage could be used as a buffer to warm water before sending it to a power plant. I’m assuming less fuel would be needed to create steam.
I think modern turbines use regenerators to reclaim this heat already.
If air is moved through the sand storage, No loss in pipes to transfer the heat with another medium. In my area there is several hundred feet layer of air filled sand below the ground above the water table. 56 degree air could be heat pumped down to 35. There would also be the phase change of moist in the cooling of the 100% humidity air to 35 degrees. This Condensate is drinking water quality. Plus a heat pump will use ground heat when atmosphere air is below 56.
Our house in america was made with extremely thick plaster and wood walls, with spray foam around the wood and its lasted 80 years or so
This sounds really good. I think the only big problem is figuring out how to store the heat for long enough. But this sounds perfet for municipal heating which is very common in Europe. And even during the summer, people use hot water. So why not heat it with stored solar or wind energy rather than burning gas? This sould help rationing energy a lot better and more efficiently.
What's missing from these videos is what similar things have been done before and what we can learn from them.
What happened about the copper heat storage we heard about some months ago? It consisted of a couple of gigantic graphite blocks with a few tons of copper sealed within each. The copper was heated to melting point with the excess power and then this was later used to vaporise water for a steam turbine to recover the power when needed.
It seemed like a great way to store energy since it could be installed in redundant coal fired generation sites.
This scales up very well. Volume of a cylinder increases faster than surface area so a larger unit has more storage volume with less surface area to lose heat. It does not scale down very well for the same reason... be hard to keep it at 600*C for months if it's only the size of say an oil barrel.
I wonder what kind of insulation materials and techniques might do the job for a small size container.
I went down this road somewhat in 1976, you can not imagine the problems that water can create, you must find a better medium for the thermal heat transfer first. Glycol, is better but not without problems.
I would be interested in finding out if there are any power generation or storage solutions that rely on cold temperatures instead of hot?
Wonder what they could do with peanut shell, long ago in Florida I saw smoke coming from the pile of shells and owner said if you take a raw turkey in foil and bury it, it can cook fully in 4 hours
would storing heat and insulating it be more efficient than just using the weight of the sand to make a gravity battery? Wouldn't that also be more ideal for months long storage considering it wouldn't lose any energy over time at all and only on storage?
Did you watch a video? They are using isolated tank with sand storing heat over months, not gravity.
@@razeclp3989 I asked a question, i am fully aware of what happened in the video. Did you read my question? I even stated that theyre storing heat and asked if itd be more efficient than a gravity battery over time
Nice video. One correction: Russian gas or lack or it is actually almost no problem in Finland. Most of the district heating companies use other energy sources including renewables. But yes we do have too long and cold winters.
I've heard theories about ancient Egypt using wireless electricity and river as distribution but learning this, now it makes more sense that sand can store energy that well..
We help build one of these for a farm the heat level was a lot lower and it was solar water heater it heated the sand, but the sand bank lasted all winter , and charge all summer. I have another I solar heat my shed and store the heat in wax last about 72 hours . will keep above 50 at the floor and 137 at the roof since it for dogs they love it.
Man Matt puts out so much info on so many different types of batteries, im lost. I guess thats a great problem to have. A abundance of choices for the future
So, if I fill a 55G drum with sand, and run wires from a solar panel into the sand, heat will be stored in the drum and can then be released and/or directed (say, into a room) by a channel of cool air?
everything sound good but how you put 500 degrees Celsius in air to water heat exchanger? What you do with air ? you lost the heated air, and what kind of heat exchangers can you find to resist this temperature?
Many houses have waterborne heat where the energy source is electric boilers, oil-fired boilers or wood-burning boilers. When these are ready for renovation, you can use sand storage of energy, together with heat pump technology and solar cells and batteries, as well as a backup solution based on a diesel-powered automated 8-10 kW generator, you will have an energy supply solution that can be used on a property and that is scalable. Then you do not need to be connected to the power grid and you hardly need to buy energy. Can be used on small detached houses, commercial buildings and apartment buildings. All these are well-established technologies with off-the-shelf components. This can be implemented in new houses and in established buildings when the time comes for renovation
In the early 1970's when oil prices tripled, a few builders used insulated foundations and 3 to 4 feet of sand in the insulated area under the house and added heat from solar water or evacuated solar water heating tubes. It was a reliable and fairly inexpensive way to store heat for days or into several weeks. The biggest decided factor in a lot of systems is affordability. For heat retention; super insulation is probably the cheapest and most reliable of all concepts. Anything else is a band-aid over an even bigger injury.
I think this is really interesting. First off, it is safe and will not directly contaminate the environment--that's huge. But I wonder if someone that has a large enough property to install a tank could use a scaled down version of this to sustain their own home through the winter. In more rural areas and in farming communities I could see this working well enough to provide plenty of heat for the winter. No?
Yes sounds like a great idea... How far r they to building the sand batterey, in how mant states n or citys so far???
Ok maybe I am crazy but Couldn't you run a refrigerant line/coil threw the sand as well and set up some kind of Epic scale Geo thermal heat pump to cool threw the same HVAC system you would use to distribute the hot air?
I have been fascinated with all these various battery solutions ever since I first learned of “gravity batteries” many years ago. Thanks for sharing these new approaches. Interesting stuff.