Interesting storage, makes sense for industrial! For homes, there is a Dutch company NEStore that now does vacuum hot water storage up to 110 degrees. 20 and 30kWh storage in a conventional boiler size, without any heat loss (1% per day only)
- so why not improve the energy storage - increase pressure rating of the boiler and triple the temps.. (heat exchange for low pressure -hot water uses) "If the heat loss scales - the greater the volume the less % lost).. (Vacuum flask is just the insulation.)
Albeit a nice idea, the issue is that if you don't use a material with a very high heat capacity, you end up with very heavy devices for a usable energy storage capacity. A lot of houses and quite industrial buildings will not have the static capacity to carry it. You will have to install it on a new foundation next to the existing building.
Very interesting that version 2.0 has repairability. Not sure about elements getting replaced. Might be if they last the first 30 hours of burn in, they will 99.5% last 50,000+ hours with clean input.
Why are they scrapping the domestic ones? is it to do with getting your product to market faster, or another reason? Do you foresee a day when this will once again be available for domestic users?
I was thinking that , rather than resistive heating, they could use induction heating which does away with the problem of elements burning out and having to be changed.
Did i understand that correct Electricity power and heat blower which heat up the sand or is it a resistance heater? . And can you transfer heat from ACs in this thermal storage?
It is another heat accumulating tech, but looks very costly for building a heat battery, especially compared with just sand silo, which literally does not have much aside from sand, pipe and insulation. Finally if the goal is for the energy of the renewable to be cost efficient (including storage) any storage tech should be as dirt (or sand) cheap as possible.
Seems like the solution here is for known amounts of steam to fit existing industrial plant? Feels like it's not really seasonal, more like overnight charging at low electricity price, and to make use of windy days for a few days.
If it's steam at >250°C, and in thinner pipes, then the surface area to volume ratio is bigger so that's more heat loss for a given volume, BUT the smaller pipes also mean lower absolute surface area, and with like 5x the temperature difference, presuming the same insulation, aren't you losing at least five times the heat to the environment? Does the pumping efficiency save more power than it loses? Higher temp sounds less efficient to me...
@@toyotaprius79 @11:30 they say the pipes for steam are much smaller than for water heating. So lower surface area per unit length, but the steam is on average closer to the outside/a larger proportion of the flowing steam is in contact with the pipe surfaces, meaning more heat loss per unit length. Say 5mm for steam and 25mm for water: 5mm diameter is 15.71mm circumference (per unit length for area), 78.54mm circumference for 25mm water pipe (per unit length for area), That's 5x the surface area per unit length. No idea if the power delivery per area cross section is 5x for steam vs water. Looks like the latent heat of vaporization is about 500x the specific heat capacity of water, so the steam pipe might get away with ~500x less cross sectional area. Then there's the probably greater than five times higher difference in temperature from 50°C to ambient up to 250°C. Greater than because on overage most of humanity lives in temperate climates, which is >0°C, so at 50°C the dT to ambient is
Very interesting technology. I can see the benefit in using this tech when you have excess or cheap electricity. This technology would be great for use with solar generated electricity applied directly to the heating elements in the heat block, as inverters and battery storage would not be needed, cutting the price of the solar installation significantly. I think this technology is best used to produce heat as needed for commercial use or heating buildings and water, when the electricity used to heat the system and the system itself combined are less expensive as a total cost to operate than other alternative heating systems, or this system is a backup to another system for outages and or surges in peak heat production needs. I wish I had one of these small units to use with solar panels to heat my lumber drying kiln. I spend an average of $700 on electricity for each load, which almost negates any profit from running the kiln. Because my kiln is small, I currently use electric heating along with a dehumidification unit to heat the kiln. Because the temperature in the kiln has to be controlled precisely, I can not use solar panel produced electricity directly. But with a large enough thermal battery, I could store about a week of solar panel heat production before I start the process, ensuring I have plenty of heating for the entire 3-6 week drying process. Also, at times during the drying process, it is nessasary to add moisture back into the kiln, and steam would be the preferred method. This is a very good use case for the thermal battery.
@normanboyes4983 Yes, I. The right location, the power from the wind turbine wouldn't even have to touch the grid, negating any service charge. Also, with small wind turbines, the operators often have problems with runaway power production to the inverter during heavy winds, and they are supposed to have a secondary resistive load to keep the turbine from overspinning if they have a passive furling method. One of the guys around here had a small 6kw wind turbine. In a wind storm, it started his barn on fire when the controls in the barn melted down.
Yes, yes, yes, all very nice high temp storage. But if it's heated by resistive electric elements then it consumes something like four times as much electricity for a given amount of heating compared to a heat pump? I guess that heat pump efficiency drops off at higher temperatures so the maths works out that resistive at >250C is more efficient than a heat pump?
You'd want to use these where you had extra solar or wind power on the grid that needed to be sucked up. Instead of putting those extra electrons into batteries, you'd put them into one of these. You potentially could still use a heat pump to preheat the water that has come back from the condenser. Depending on its start and end temps though, a residential heat pump may not be a good fit.
@@zonehd3433 I'm struggling to find data to support your claim. Low temperature thermal batteries like the SunAmp Thermino lose about 7% over 24 hours (12kWh capacity, 0.84 kWh/24h heat loss rate). LiFePo4 lose about 2% per month. That's about a hundredth of the energy loss rate. For the same insulation level, the higher the temp the greater the heat loss meaning this tech would be a lot worse than that.
@@Cynthia_Cantrellmost industrial applications such as milk, oil & gas, textiles, etc have most of their processes below 400C . So, your idea of heat pump till 250 and then resistive heating is great. By the way, I work on solar thermal and its applications since 8 years and have an industrial plant operating since 2017 in south India.
This could actually be useful for district heating as well. Typically at night there isnt as much power being used so you could just heat up the blocks at night when power is cheap and then in the morning when more heat is needed that can heat up the water. Even during the day it could basically be used to stabilize the grid since the heating rods dont really care if they are running at full power or no power or anywhere in between. With a smart system they can basically follow grid frequency. If they are just adding this on then if there is a natural gas system that could be used if there is a period where maybe they need more heat with not much excess power to maintain. In theory this system could almost be free to use once they pay for it. The grid operators might even pay for it since as I said the system would be more used to keep the grid stable which means the power they are putting into the system is power they want to use up anyways. Where I live we have a lot of wind and solar with natural gas power plants and one issue is if there are fluctuations in power output from the wind and solar they need to keep the natural gas plants running so they can quick ramp up power. Like in one case within 3 minutes a solar plant lost 170 MW of output. Sure you can put in a lot of batteries but if you can just keep the natural gas plants operating they can ramp up quickly to take that load. If the plants are basically running at a lower rate and you have systems like this all over the place they can get cheap power. Our peak wind power is also at night but again they need the natural gas plants still running to deal with fluctuations in power so it would just mean these systems could use that really cheap power to heat everything up and then when that heat is needed it gets used. And before anyone says they could just use batteries to stabilize the grid. Our peak power use is 12 GWh. Our wind and solar can drop down to basically nothing for hours or days at a time. To back up that much power with batteries just doesnt make any sense. Last winter we had a period of basically no solar and wind production for 3 days. It would require 864k MW of battery backup.
How do you get the heat from this system to all the buildings that would need it? It's impossible to be used on anything other than a small local scale. If it's used for heating homes it can't be for backup,it would have to be the primary system.why would anyone have 2 types of heat source, 2 types of radiator? Don't think you've thought it through. Batteries can easily be scaled up, and connect to an existing power network China added more than the whole UK power generation in one year with renewables. They don't see a problem
@@harryw29district heating is a thing that exists in most major population centers. And heat generation from solar is more efficient than PV. China added more power generation, not more storage (yet). Admittedly, they're at the forefront of that too, but they do have the benefit of foresight to massively develop battery manufacturing.
I don't believe in the climate/net-zero horse poo but this does seem like a good way to use waste ally and store/move heat.. keep up the good work guys.
I suspect it is not worth the effort. These things just work better at scale (in the same way wind turbines do). In manufacturing terms they have to focus on the market requirement and keep special tooling to the absolute minimum.
I suspect the cost of the home units weren't competitive vs hot water storage or alternatives. By scaling, they've decreased costs by 50% for the intermediate versions, something they just couldn't do unless they had massive scale.
Scale is everything and selling business to business is easier as it’s mainly about cost and less about aesthetics etc - they can use the money and learnings from the industrial venture and follow-up with domestic offerings (IMHO)
the very last thing we want to do is to convert electricity directly to heat for any purpose. Commercial heatpumps can easily produce steam for industrial uses
That's true right now, but as the electricity generation switches to renewables it will be more common to have excess power available. If the price difference between peak and off-peak is greater than the COP of a heat pump, then storage is better value.
@@robinbennett5994 there is never going to be "excess power available". Electrical energy will be used at whatever marginal cost exists at the time. It is pointless to waste electricity to heat water directly.
@@ldm3027 My neighbor (in the Netherlands) has PV panels and has a flexible electricity contract. This summer, several times the price dropped below zero. Free power, but as his PV-panels produced electricity, he better turned his PV-panels off. Or put the excess power in a home battery, be it electric or thermal. This is small scale and not very frequent yet, but it exists already and will only increase.
@@ldm3027 I have PV-panels and do my bit. I used to run the dishwasher at night, now during the day. That is the only significant demand that I can shift in time. On a larger scale, factories have the same financial incentive and have done their bit. Nevertheless, there is sometimes excess (free) electricity in the Netherlands. If we continue to fit more PV-panels, the supply around noon will only increase, while demand will not. The solution is storage, central or home battery, or in a heat battery.
It's basically a storage heater, failed model, 1.8 tons for residential, the reinforcement and delivery costs on that wouldn't be feasible. All these efforts would be better in doing bigger interconnectors.
Its always interesting listening to someone who clearly knows their onions.
Interesting storage, makes sense for industrial!
For homes, there is a Dutch company NEStore that now does vacuum hot water storage up to 110 degrees. 20 and 30kWh storage in a conventional boiler size, without any heat loss (1% per day only)
- so why not improve the energy storage - increase pressure rating of the boiler and triple the temps.. (heat exchange for low pressure -hot water uses) "If the heat loss scales - the greater the volume the less % lost)..
(Vacuum flask is just the insulation.)
It would make more sense if you have an appartement building
Albeit a nice idea, the issue is that if you don't use a material with a very high heat capacity, you end up with very heavy devices for a usable energy storage capacity. A lot of houses and quite industrial buildings will not have the static capacity to carry it. You will have to install it on a new foundation next to the existing building.
Very interesting that version 2.0 has repairability. Not sure about elements getting replaced. Might be if they last the first 30 hours of burn in, they will 99.5% last 50,000+ hours with clean input.
Love the enthusiasm, if only more people were so focused on developing solutions rather than being negative about climate change
More is not always better.
Climate change?
@@markrainford1219 Climate change never stops. The biggie is it is not CO2, so net zero can achieve nothing but misery. Not my opinion but physics.
Why are they scrapping the domestic ones? is it to do with getting your product to market faster, or another reason? Do you foresee a day when this will once again be available for domestic users?
Great to see two of my favourites, the technology an dthe application. Let's see more of it!
I was thinking that , rather than resistive heating, they could use induction heating which does away with the problem of elements burning out and having to be changed.
This system is usable for a 10 or more condo units with solar onthe roofs with distributed steam to the units hot water and heating systems
Did i understand that correct Electricity power and heat blower which heat up the sand or is it a resistance heater? .
And can you transfer heat from ACs in this thermal storage?
Very lovely video
Would this be useful for community heating still dont understand why these heat batteries don't use them in conjunction wuth sterling engines
Sterling engines struggle with power output.
It is another heat accumulating tech, but looks very costly for building a heat battery, especially compared with just sand silo, which literally does not have much aside from sand, pipe and insulation. Finally if the goal is for the energy of the renewable to be cost efficient (including storage) any storage tech should be as dirt (or sand) cheap as possible.
Rondo heat battery look good👍
Seems like the solution here is for known amounts of steam to fit existing industrial plant? Feels like it's not really seasonal, more like overnight charging at low electricity price, and to make use of windy days for a few days.
Great video - you need to spread the news of the channel
This chap sounds like Raymond Baxter.
How are the triangular aluminium rock w dge blocks recycled?
If it's steam at >250°C, and in thinner pipes, then the surface area to volume ratio is bigger so that's more heat loss for a given volume, BUT the smaller pipes also mean lower absolute surface area, and with like 5x the temperature difference, presuming the same insulation, aren't you losing at least five times the heat to the environment? Does the pumping efficiency save more power than it loses? Higher temp sounds less efficient to me...
If each exiting pipe retained the same small diameter and exposed to the air, yeah sure maybe, but it doesn't look like that
@@toyotaprius79 What does it look like?
@@toyotaprius79 @11:30 they say the pipes for steam are much smaller than for water heating. So lower surface area per unit length, but the steam is on average closer to the outside/a larger proportion of the flowing steam is in contact with the pipe surfaces, meaning more heat loss per unit length. Say 5mm for steam and 25mm for water: 5mm diameter is 15.71mm circumference (per unit length for area), 78.54mm circumference for 25mm water pipe (per unit length for area), That's 5x the surface area per unit length. No idea if the power delivery per area cross section is 5x for steam vs water. Looks like the latent heat of vaporization is about 500x the specific heat capacity of water, so the steam pipe might get away with ~500x less cross sectional area.
Then there's the probably greater than five times higher difference in temperature from 50°C to ambient up to 250°C. Greater than because on overage most of humanity lives in temperate climates, which is >0°C, so at 50°C the dT to ambient is
Well when are we gonna get the small, domestic options?
It's called a storage heater!
Very interesting technology.
I can see the benefit in using this tech when you have excess or cheap electricity.
This technology would be great for use with solar generated electricity applied directly to the heating elements in the heat block, as inverters and battery storage would not be needed, cutting the price of the solar installation significantly.
I think this technology is best used to produce heat as needed for commercial use or heating buildings and water, when the electricity used to heat the system and the system itself combined are less expensive as a total cost to operate than other alternative heating systems, or this system is a backup to another system for outages and or surges in peak heat production needs.
I wish I had one of these small units to use with solar panels to heat my lumber drying kiln. I spend an average of $700 on electricity for each load, which almost negates any profit from running the kiln. Because my kiln is small, I currently use electric heating along with a dehumidification unit to heat the kiln. Because the temperature in the kiln has to be controlled precisely, I can not use solar panel produced electricity directly. But with a large enough thermal battery, I could store about a week of solar panel heat production before I start the process, ensuring I have plenty of heating for the entire 3-6 week drying process. Also, at times during the drying process, it is nessasary to add moisture back into the kiln, and steam would be the preferred method. This is a very good use case for the thermal battery.
You could marry this up (in the right location) to a huge wind turbine as the source of power.
@normanboyes4983 Yes, I. The right location, the power from the wind turbine wouldn't even have to touch the grid, negating any service charge.
Also, with small wind turbines, the operators often have problems with runaway power production to the inverter during heavy winds, and they are supposed to have a secondary resistive load to keep the turbine from overspinning if they have a passive furling method.
One of the guys around here had a small 6kw wind turbine. In a wind storm, it started his barn on fire when the controls in the barn melted down.
Do it - put in a 20kw array of solar
This iscsomething we are interested in seeing how things have progressed.
Interesting stuff 🤓
This technology is important to store excess solar in summer and excess wind in winter.
Go faster to satisfy all the demand and the urgent need for the climate, to get economies of scale...
It's modern steampunk without much shine
Just make the cover look brassy
Yes, yes, yes, all very nice high temp storage. But if it's heated by resistive electric elements then it consumes something like four times as much electricity for a given amount of heating compared to a heat pump? I guess that heat pump efficiency drops off at higher temperatures so the maths works out that resistive at >250C is more efficient than a heat pump?
You'd want to use these where you had extra solar or wind power on the grid that needed to be sucked up. Instead of putting those extra electrons into batteries, you'd put them into one of these.
You potentially could still use a heat pump to preheat the water that has come back from the condenser. Depending on its start and end temps though, a residential heat pump may not be a good fit.
Heatstorage can store energy for longer than batteries
@@zonehd3433 I'm struggling to find data to support your claim.
Low temperature thermal batteries like the SunAmp Thermino lose about 7% over 24 hours (12kWh capacity, 0.84 kWh/24h heat loss rate). LiFePo4 lose about 2% per month. That's about a hundredth of the energy loss rate.
For the same insulation level, the higher the temp the greater the heat loss meaning this tech would be a lot worse than that.
@@Cynthia_Cantrellmost industrial applications such as milk, oil & gas, textiles, etc have most of their processes below 400C .
So, your idea of heat pump till 250 and then resistive heating is great.
By the way, I work on solar thermal and its applications since 8 years and have an industrial plant operating since 2017 in south India.
@@anuj0kamboj Excellent! Thanks for helping save the planet!
Not very well explained how they get the heat in and out ?
Resistance heating and steam pipe reclamation?
This could actually be useful for district heating as well. Typically at night there isnt as much power being used so you could just heat up the blocks at night when power is cheap and then in the morning when more heat is needed that can heat up the water. Even during the day it could basically be used to stabilize the grid since the heating rods dont really care if they are running at full power or no power or anywhere in between. With a smart system they can basically follow grid frequency. If they are just adding this on then if there is a natural gas system that could be used if there is a period where maybe they need more heat with not much excess power to maintain. In theory this system could almost be free to use once they pay for it. The grid operators might even pay for it since as I said the system would be more used to keep the grid stable which means the power they are putting into the system is power they want to use up anyways. Where I live we have a lot of wind and solar with natural gas power plants and one issue is if there are fluctuations in power output from the wind and solar they need to keep the natural gas plants running so they can quick ramp up power. Like in one case within 3 minutes a solar plant lost 170 MW of output. Sure you can put in a lot of batteries but if you can just keep the natural gas plants operating they can ramp up quickly to take that load. If the plants are basically running at a lower rate and you have systems like this all over the place they can get cheap power. Our peak wind power is also at night but again they need the natural gas plants still running to deal with fluctuations in power so it would just mean these systems could use that really cheap power to heat everything up and then when that heat is needed it gets used.
And before anyone says they could just use batteries to stabilize the grid. Our peak power use is 12 GWh. Our wind and solar can drop down to basically nothing for hours or days at a time. To back up that much power with batteries just doesnt make any sense. Last winter we had a period of basically no solar and wind production for 3 days. It would require 864k MW of battery backup.
How do you get the heat from this system to all the buildings that would need it? It's impossible to be used on anything other than a small local scale. If it's used for heating homes it can't be for backup,it would have to be the primary system.why would anyone have 2 types of heat source, 2 types of radiator?
Don't think you've thought it through.
Batteries can easily be scaled up, and connect to an existing power network
China added more than the whole UK power generation in one year with renewables. They don't see a problem
@@harryw29district heating is a thing that exists in most major population centers. And heat generation from solar is more efficient than PV.
China added more power generation, not more storage (yet). Admittedly, they're at the forefront of that too, but they do have the benefit of foresight to massively develop battery manufacturing.
Rondo heat battery look better.
1,500⁰ C uppermost temperature.
R.I.P. car engine block
When Engineers run companies and not Accountants.........
I don't believe in the climate/net-zero horse poo but this does seem like a good way to use waste ally and store/move heat.. keep up the good work guys.
You can keep your net zero beer, I like mine full strength thanks. 🍺
So are they not doing domestic versions now?
Sounds like they’ve recalled all but four…
I suspect it is not worth the effort. These things just work better at scale (in the same way wind turbines do). In manufacturing terms they have to focus on the market requirement and keep special tooling to the absolute minimum.
I suspect the cost of the home units weren't competitive vs hot water storage or alternatives. By scaling, they've decreased costs by 50% for the intermediate versions, something they just couldn't do unless they had massive scale.
Scale is everything and selling business to business is easier as it’s mainly about cost and less about aesthetics etc - they can use the money and learnings from the industrial venture and follow-up with domestic offerings (IMHO)
It's bad optics for a company selling zero/low carbon tech using gas as part of their own manufacturing process.
the very last thing we want to do is to convert electricity directly to heat for any purpose. Commercial heatpumps can easily produce steam for industrial uses
That's true right now, but as the electricity generation switches to renewables it will be more common to have excess power available. If the price difference between peak and off-peak is greater than the COP of a heat pump, then storage is better value.
@@robinbennett5994 there is never going to be "excess power available". Electrical energy will be used at whatever marginal cost exists at the time. It is pointless to waste electricity to heat water directly.
@@ldm3027 My neighbor (in the Netherlands) has PV panels and has a flexible electricity contract. This summer, several times the price dropped below zero. Free power, but as his PV-panels produced electricity, he better turned his PV-panels off. Or put the excess power in a home battery, be it electric or thermal. This is small scale and not very frequent yet, but it exists already and will only increase.
@@JanKluiver in fact it will only get better as the system management adjusts to cope with the current excess of demand over supply
@@ldm3027 I have PV-panels and do my bit. I used to run the dishwasher at night, now during the day. That is the only significant demand that I can shift in time. On a larger scale, factories have the same financial incentive and have done their bit. Nevertheless, there is sometimes excess (free) electricity in the Netherlands. If we continue to fit more PV-panels, the supply around noon will only increase, while demand will not. The solution is storage, central or home battery, or in a heat battery.
Old Finnish invention
It's basically a storage heater, failed model, 1.8 tons for residential, the reinforcement and delivery costs on that wouldn't be feasible. All these efforts would be better in doing bigger interconnectors.
They got a £470,000 grant from the Gov, it's hard not to be cynical.
Storage heaters work very well indeed. The issue last time I checked caldera was that the heat storage was just too small…
It's more like a heat battery, cost per kwh is so much lower than for electrical storage,
@@arkatub better going to this than carbon capture bs
Too small for what purpose?