How A Sand Battery Could Change The Energy Game



How A Sand Battery Could Change The Energy Game – Thermal Energy Storage Explained. Try 14 days for free: http://aura.com/matt . Thank you to Aura for sponsoring this video! As you know, efficient energy storage systems are the conundrum of making the most out of intermittent renewable energy. Unless you’ve had your head in the sand, it’s a glaring problem we have to solve, which is why so many different battery technologies are being explored and developed. To the point that some of them are now coming out of the sand … that’s what recently happened in Finland where the world’s first commercial sand battery technology went live this past July. How does it work and is it a viable path for storing energy? Let’s see if we can come to a decision on this.

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39 thoughts on “How A Sand Battery Could Change The Energy Game”

  1. in 2019 there was an article published by the bcc called 'why the world is running out of sand'. Maybe you can provide some proof for your claims instead of just saying 'since sand is dirt cheap…' which is obviously false. There are plenty of documentaries about disappearing beaches due to high sand demand etc.

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  2. But how do we get from MWh to GWh? A land like Germany requires 1.3 GWh per day. Thus your Sandstorage can cover onöy a few minutes of darkness. I hate these half baked ideas which pop up simply because someone avoids to put in numbers.

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  3. Please discontinue your use of acronyms…. It can cause some communication issues with people that have memory issues or just don't care to remember the five bazillion acronyms we are continually subjected to.

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  4. Woow, I dont know about that. How you deliver the heat? Sounds to me like you'd need a whole new type of pipes or conductors to do that. Besides I dont see much application for it outside of heating houses and then it raises a question of the cost per unit and dimensions of said units. Meanwhile some turbines are better off deactivated when there is no demand, because wear and tear is a thing that too costs money, magnets in the generators are degrading not to mention any moving parts which degrade by definition. If we lived in the universe or on a planet where water had a bad heat capacity it would be understandable to cheer for a cheap material like dirt to be usable in such contraptions, it would be fine, but we dont, so why go the extra lenghth? So basically it about building giant boilers, right? Well it doesnt get much cheaper or easier to build when you switch water for sand. Meanwhile you people should start investing research and work into making really air tight walls cheap instead of what we have now. Because right now on every 10m² of wall you get up to a 30×30 cm accumulated area of a hole finely distributed across the whole area. Its like a sixth of a window that remains open no matter what you do. The only thing that makes it better than a hole is that no wind can actually blow through it with full speed. Only with like <9% of initial speed. So yeah. Dont sell me oversized boilers. Sell me actual walls worth paying for.

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  5. I am an engineer and this sand battery, while cool, has the same problem as most energy storing methods. Energy transfer loss, or the scientifuc fact that when ever energy changes form from one medium to another energy is lost and 100% effiency is impossible. Lets follow this system here. The energy starts as wind and sunshine. It gets transformed into electricity at the windmill and losses alot of energy during the process. Then the electricity gets put into the sand where it has to be transformed into heat energy. Alot of energy gets lost here. Then the energy has to be tranfered out of the sand and back into electricity, lossing energy again. Through this method it would be lucky if the end user got 50% of the energy that was harvested. This method bleeds energy and is not very efficient. Plus all of the metal needed to build it can't be melted and formed with electrical energy. Metal requires burning something to get it hot enough to form. Plus windmills and solar panels require more of a carbon foot to build then they clean up. Windmills have short lifespans and are hazordous to the enviroment to duspose of when they break. Solar panels require large mines to dig up the rare earth minerals required to build them. Plus just burying old and broken sokar panels is toxic to the enviroment.

    The way forward is nuclear. We as engineers have completly overhauled and redesigned the system from the ground up. The plants currently in use are decades old and are caveman tech in comparison to what we can build now.

    The fuel rods that we can build now are designed to never expload, and we need much less fuel to build the reactor then before.

    Nuclear is safe now and has absolutly zero emmissions.

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  6. I love the idea for Alberta, Canada, where the sun beats down and the cold is crazy, each for 6 months per year. Store heat in the ground and harvest in the winter!! How hard is that to to? What scale for a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere?

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  7. Just wondering if you could use a tank full of compost with similar coil pipes as shown but have water flowing through reciveing the radiated heat through the pipe from the compost,
    as compost is a really good at heating to high tempurtures, I know I'm stepping away from the topic of battery storage tech and talking more about the way we harvest energy but I'm curious to know if it's a good idea and am wondering if anyone has tried to use compost in such an way.

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  8. I always figured long distance heat transmission was infeasible. Even within a few city blocks, I'd imagine a heated pipe system could work, but require thermal hubs or such and overall a lot more infrastructure and maintenance compared to an electrical system. I'm willing to be wrong about that though.

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  9. Your assumption that Co2 is a prob;lem and claim of dirty sources is utterl;y false. All real grahs show CO2 is massive;y down over millions of years to its current lowest point. CO2 has no correlation to Temperature and Greenhouse effects a mainly caused by water vapor. The world desperately needs more CO2

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  10. This is currently one of the most interesting long-term seasonal energy storage cost wise. Let see, if it is real or fake. Only HPS Picea H2 storage seems to be a real competitor, which is already reality and no fake.

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  11. here in new england almost all colleges have singular large heat plant to feed all the buildings, typically steam is used. I could see this as a huge market for this technology. Also a huge heat / energy loss is heated walkways / stairs to avoid shoveling after snow and could use the stored heat for that as well.

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  12. I really wonder if this technology would work for a home with green power like solar panels.

    And even if its 25% efficient. If it is cheap enough and can store enough power it would still be worth it.

    Its in the end more about how much it costs vs how much you can gain

    Getting 25% of wasted power as energy is better then 0%

    Reply
  13. It would be good for solar thermal plants. I did some work in one in Arizona that used concave mirrors to focus light energy to a pipe heating oil in the pipe. The the heat would go to a boiler to heat water into steam to run a turbine. They also had a storage tank to keep the access heated oil to run a few hours into the night. They could use the sand thermal battery to store even more heat to run longer.

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  14. This is a very old idea. You can make a batterie or energy conservator out of basically everything. The question is allways, is it efficiant? And a sand batterie is not. That is why this idea was dropped a century ago.

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  15. There is a lot of misleading information here. A lot of wind turbines stand idle because they are broken. Concentrated solar has been a disaster, from a capacity factor standpoint. The 2 plants in Nevada don't come close to putting out their rated MWe, even on the sunniest days. And heat storage doesn't hold a candle to pump storage. These companies are trying to get fancy but pump storage is a proven and super efficient technology.

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  16. Since heat pumps have a COP of 4+, that'd bring the 25% efficiency back to 100%. In fact, one can argue that the energy is only worth 25% in the form of heat, since it's illegal to convert electricity to heat in anything but a heat pump (Denmark).

    Reply

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