How A Sand Battery Could Change The Energy Game
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- Опубликовано: 28 сен 2024
- How A Sand Battery Could Change The Energy Game - Thermal Energy Storage Explained. Try 14 days for free: 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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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.
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?
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 RUclips 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 RUclips! 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 RUclips are feeding u the facts but they are not!
@@northstar32v8 I second this 👌
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 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.
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
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.
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 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
ruclips.net/video/88kBvz8lVVg/видео.html
Here's a pretty good overview of the urban farmers new setup
ruclips.net/video/von7IxA7uQc/видео.html
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.
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.
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
Just noticed your channel has surpassed 1 million subscribers! Such a great channel more than deserving of those numbers. Keep up the good work.
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
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?
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 .
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
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
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!
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
Finland, while not at shores of Atlantic is getting huge wind energy surge. Couple reasons. In here you bolt directly even the largest windmils of world after two kicks to clear the vegetation. Most of the country is solid granite bedrock, just drill biiiig bolts and drop the mill in its place. 😮 We also have space, lots, lots and lots of space where no one lives.
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.
Finally, countries with a lot of sand will have an energy option.
....oh wait a sec.
Good one.
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.
To those talking about storage heaters in the UK in the 60s -- We had storage heaters in Ireland at least until the 90s, and although that's when I left Ireland, I see they are still for sale in Ireland and the UK.
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
There’s this other method that’s pretty good at producing a lot of very green energy:
Nuclear power
HELL YA
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.)
If this Sand battery and CSP are combined, then we can store heat at summer and use it at winter. Sensational !
All of the temperature puns. And you never crack a smile at your own jokes. Keep up the good work.
😂
Let’s take a moment and appreciate the sand transition effect at 7:26
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.
Idea for short terms storage, let's say multiple cycles in in a month utilizing cheap energy hours is feasible but let's say if one wants to store summer energy over winter it would require massive size battery to cover need of energy for several winter months even for relatively small size apartment building. What is 8MW storage capacity if building with 2000 square meters in mid winter needs 30MW heating capacity. The size of that storage facility would become enormous.
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.
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..
Maybe I missed it in the video but it seems to have been brought up in some of the comments. Longevity should be a big selling point on this. Battery solutions have a shelf life that requires quite a bit when needing to replace them. Something along these lines should have a much longer lifespan. Unless the container breakers the sand would last indefinitely. I would think electronic components outside that would be, comparatively, cheaper to fix/replace than a battery wall would be. That would make it worth being considered at least. Plus as one person already stated, there are no rare earth materials or dangerous chemicals involved in this one at least in the storage portion of things
I was expecting such batteries since year 1999. When i was in school, Wow
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?
This is perfect for greenhouse seasonal heating!
I would be interested in finding out if there are any power generation or storage solutions that rely on cold temperatures instead of hot?
Obviously they could be located anywhere the heat is needed since the reticulation of the power to heat them is very easy to manage. I will be playing with one to heat my off grid house.
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.
In Canada the sand that is laid down in the winter is not reused as it has sodium and dirt etc, It would be an excellent source for these sand batteries.
Didn’t know about sand (heat storage) batteries, thanks for the education. Reminds me of going to the beach on a cool evening and wondering why the sand is still so warm. Like liquid earth.
I believe the location of these sandboxes would not be near any solar farm or wind farms. Hence, the transmission losses from the plant to the box would also be taken into account. Currently we don’t have a way to separate out where the energy is coming from the renewable source or not when heating this batter from the grid. Nonetheless, an interesting concept for seasonal load shifting.
Curtailment is renewable energy's super weapon, not a downside to be minimised. I love the rethink X videos on this topic.
Electricity and Heat are key and they don't transfer back & forth perfectly. PV solar panels, wind & wave turbines, or hydro-electric to get electricity can be used with various kinds of batteries like LiIon, molten salts, heated sand, gravity batteries, TPV, etc. which can hold energy for later. But, do you get electricity or heat later? Pick your sources and batteries accordingly.
Generating heat to be used as heat can be stored in a heat battery (molten salts, sand, water, etc.). A simple box-style solar heater can heat sand, water, or anything. We use a lot of heated air & water in our homes and other places, but if you store the heat in a heat battery, then count on using it for heat later too. Converting it to electricity isn't so efficient (yet, though see TPVs).
There is also the green house surrounding your house. It collects heat directly to the air you want to be warmer. The EarthShip shows how to store a lot of that heat in a "thermal mass". And modern insulation techniques show how to conserve or avoid wasting a lot of heat energy (see passive houses).
It's a multi-technique approach which we have already developed to a large extent.
Transportation is more difficult because of the energy density needed, but look at what CATL is doing.
Does not require district wide infrastructure. The concept still applies at smaller scales. You could build a unit for any given building.
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 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?
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.
The desert gets very cold after the sun goes down. That's what the pyramids were used for in Egypt. Sandstone retains heat pretty well and it can be used at night to heat the palaces.
It's true! We risk a situation of having to little sand.
If this could be scaled down so that offgrid solar and wind sites can take advantage of their surplus energy production and use it for heating in the winter. I know dump loads are common in most solar and wind power setups so this is another logical storage option.
Phase change materials have good energy storage density, such as wax/salt.
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.
In Finland, there is also a great lithium battery replacement battery invention, broadbit.
there is a company out of calgary called eavor that does a version of this using geothermal technology. I think instead of building batteries above ground, why not drill pipes deep underground and store excess heat there, with a ring of geothermal wells around it to capture the excess over time.
I wonder if you could use this technology with sources of heat that gets generated from byproduct processes -- like manufacturing and running computers.
this can be seen as a how it can be done in a lower capacity in order to make it a larger scale, if you think that anyone could have one of this connected a ready for use in their garages for their on purposes.
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
Fantastic video unveiling an energy storage method I had not heard of before. Thanks much and keep up the good work!
I have watched only about 20 of your videos, but just love (more than your deep dive into whatever your talking about; which is always just awesome bye the way) that you almost always talk about scale ability of the given subject; just absolutely imperative that it’s incorporated into the feasibility of the tech you talk about. Just material facts as you know them. Great job!!!
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 would think that creating electricity from the heat being stored would be an "added bonus" when you need to move the air for distribution. the heat in the air isn't going to go away when it passes through the turbine.
Not sure, but live in a sandy area (300ft), and will definitely be trying solar-> below ground insulated green house (south facing)...will be an interesting experiment ❤😊
This could also be used in current solar thermal plants to increase the thermal storage for later power production as there is already the extra step of converting the heat to power in such a plant. If it is cheaper then there current method of simple storing the heat oil in the one type of solar thermal plant. it also lacks the weakness of a molten salt solar plant. The weakness of molten salt solar thermal plants is that you can't allow the salt to become solid or it will damage the plant.
Minneapolis Minnesota doesn't have district heating. The capital of Minnesota, St Paul does.
I’m thinking about digging a hole in my backyard with equipment I already have… then insulating it and filling it back in with pex to use dirt as a thermal battery. I really wish someone else has done it so I had an idea of how to do it right.
So far i have come across people working on a single approach to energy storage. I feel combination of a few ideas or approaches will be the answer. For example, combining sand battery with a gravity battery could have far faster adoption. Transferring heat energy to homes for winter heating has limitations - it is useful only in cold countries and where storage and usage is in close proximity. If solar energy were used directly to heat a sand battery, and heat stored were used to drive up heavy loads up a hill slope, we get option of electricity generation on call from the gravity storage. Electricity could be transmitted to any distance. Both the batteries are using natural resources to the maximum and thus will be low cost. There are two riders here - 1. You need hill slope otherwise building heavy gravity structure will have its own cost and payback. 2. Overall energy efficiency needs to be higher than combining solar PV panels with other storage methods. Is any organisation working on such a PoC ?
I think the sand battery on a household scale makes a whole bunch of sense!
Videos like this are why I watch Tony Heller
If converting electrical energy into heated air, why not use a heat pump instead of a resistive coil to be even more efficient?
Thank you for the video. It sounds like there’s so much promising you technology I just wish they would hurry up and get it to market.
I use a 250 gallon IBC full of water as my heat battery. It has a 2 square meter solar thermal panel below it, in a thermosiphon setup, so no pumps are needed. The water is the heat transfer medium. My city water passes through a heat exchanger immersed in the IBC, to preheat it for my electric flash heater. The flash heater has a thermostat set to 105 F, hot enough for a pleasant hot shower. The closer to 105 F my heat-exchanged water gets, the less energy the flash heater uses. And that energy is also solar.
The problem with heat batteries that are powered by electricity is that you convert a more _noble_ form of energy into a less _noble_ one. Considering that you could also store the electricity in a form that can be reused directly to make electricity (eg. pumping water up a mountain) it's not really that of a good idea either.
On the other hand: If you need the heat anyway and have too much clean energy that you can not use otherwise for whatever reason, this might be the perfect solution here.
You should do a set of videos on each of the promising fusion approaches that are being explored right now that are set to produce net energy in the next few years. Helion Energy, ZAP Energy, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, General Fusion, Tokamak Energy, and TAE are all close in an exciting race to the first power plant.
Requesting you to consider some improvisation based on my experience and research and make episode on them.
Firstly state of using heating elements and electricity to heat of sand it would be more efficient to use solar energy or heat pumps secondly cooling is more energy intensive then heating so some research has to be made so that such methods can be used for cooling of the space and lastly the need of the day is to make a technology which can Store cool instead of heat
Something similar was invented before WW2, Seasonal heat storage that is. I wasn't born until 1948 but we had an encyclopaedia that showed this system. It said the material in the heat store could be rocks or bricks that the summer air could be circulated through so that one end became warm. By circulating air through it into the house, it could heat the house in winter. The Structure would need to be the same size as the house it served. That's all I remember but I guess the idea never got taken up because kerosine was so cheap after the war.
Wonder what the cost / efficiency would look like at the neighborhood level. A new subdivision built with the infrastructure including the heat pumps or whatever appropriate technology inside the residences.
I'd wondered the same thing about doing geothermal on a neighborhood / subdivision scale.
Pay a premium up front for negligible heating expenses later and a more ecologically conscious outcome.
Pretty funny that this "battery" will outlive the solar panels feeding it.
That's really sick.
Have you covered the deep underground (15 mi) geothermal that they're working on?
How about Thorium as nuclear energy?
There's a third side of the equation you didn't mention.
Energy usage.
we don't actually need it...
Sand has a lower specific heat capacity (800J/kg) then water (4200J/kg). Even with it's greater density (2,62g/cm3) still we have only 2000J/kg. In fact it can be heated up to much higher temperature than unpressurised water, but that means bigger heat losses.
Low temperature water heat reservoir makes more sense. It can be heated up using a heat pump boosting energy efficiency.
PS: 8MWh of thermal energy is a drop in the ocean for a municipal heating system.
They can probably increase efficiency by replacing resistive heating with heat pumps considering they ahve over 100% efficiency (opposed to only 100% for resistive heating) : channel the excess solar generated electricity in the summer to heat pumps to extract the ambient heat in summer to be stored for autumn and winter months
Geothermal HVAC. Does take a Heat Pump unit. What about using a loop to store heat like the sand battery. Would need to limit the transmitted temperature to the loop based on the temperature limits of the loop piping material. The Geo Thermal Value might be best using a coiled looped field in sandy soil.
Instead of converting the stored heat to electricity via turbine, what about using a series of heat cells? Would that be more than 25% efficient?
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'd love to explore building one for home use. I wonder what element would work and also how best to use the heat to heat some thermal mass - perhaps underfloor heating?
Enjoyed the puns in your video!
Universities could probably implement this quickly. It would be a cool project.
The sand batteries are interesting to store heat. Are they going to be worthwhile in southern places where heat is not important during winter when freezing and snow are not common. Florida, Georgia, Texas, etc.
The sand battery seems like a possible partial solution to sustaining power during the night or winter in Finland. However, I don't see how it would be helpful to home owners, other than provided heated air for comfort needs. We need something that will maintain a source of actual electricity to run the refrigerator and TV (to watch the weather report to find out when the cold spell will break.)
Have you investigated the molten metal battery that are already in use some places in the US? Seems it might be possible to scale the shipping container-sized to something that will fit in my basement or a closet. Would you consider a video on molten metal batteries?
Could old concrete be used to make a type of 'sand' that would work? There is and will be an enormous abundance of this material.
Problems: 1. degrading type of energy from electrical (to heat the sand to 600C) to just thermal
2. transport of such heat-converted energy will be more a problem than transport of electrical energy. Since wind turbines rarely are near big cities and obviously enough/strong enough powerlines are already a problem, what to do with onsite generated heat from excessive wind, stored in sand batteries near the wind parks? Converting back to electricity comes with huge losses ....
I was thinking of using sand as a sort of physical battery for solar farms in the desert. Move sand to a higher spot when you have excess energy. Allow it to fall and power a turbine when you need power.
Perhaps with modifications and adaptions of absorption chillers the system could also help in providing cooling during summer months.
Using evacuated solar water heater(s) to transfer solar energy via tubing to a super-insulated basement style dry sand filled bunker beneath homes, garages, or commercial/industrial buildings sized accordingly to store excess heat for use during times when needed could provide the medium needed to efficiently and effectively store renewable heat energy for later needs. Storing the sand in the earth instead of an insulated silo would keep the battery in the stable temperature of the ground rather than the fluctuating environment of an above grade silo. The possibility of this technology coupled with an earth-to-air heat pump in place of the solar water heater could potentially make a geothermal heat pump much more efficient by containing the heat transfer to a dedicated space free from water.
The walls of the bunker could be built with conventional construction methods such as poured concrete, CMU’s, or ICF’s. Once built and properly waterproofed, the interior floor and walls could then be insulated with either thickly sprayed hydrophobic closed-cell polyurethane spray-foam insulation-thereby adding to the water/air proofing-or multiple layers of polyisocyanurate sheets or any other capable high performance insulation . Once constructed, dried sand could be vibrated and compacted around the needed plumbing or air tubes to provide a denser medium which would hold additional heat. This sand-filled bunker would then be topped with several inches of a foam product such as those found in load-bearing foundation footing systems onto which a concrete floor of a building could be constructed.
This sand battery could be easily scaled for use in large spaces as well by introducing additional “cells” or by digging deeper into the ground. Factories, schools, retail space, and hotels could also benefit from such a storage system allowing great savings in heating costs as well as their impact on infrastructure and the environment. By utilizing renewable, excess, or even wasted energy in a stored space for later use simply makes sense.
I think it’s a damn good idea and I definitely think it could. The only thing that could be an obstacle is the money hungry powers that be. As far as the system goes, I like it. We need this kind of innovative thinking to save the planet before it’s to late. I’m not a scientist but I do love science. Tell me if I’m wrong. It seem like this is using the sand itself to insulate the system so am I right in thinking that instead of making a few small ones making one big one would work even better because it would hold the heat even longer? Seems right to me. How about a follow up for this video. I’d like to hear more about it.
I think it has widespread application as a local or regional energy source that could make economic sense for certain industries or communities.
So in theory, it it possible to build a standalone house in the middle of the Mongolian desert with:
1. solar panels to generate electricity;
2. sand (basically everywhere) battery to store the energy; combined with;
3. geothermal air-conditioning which uses the generated/stored electricity to keep daytime cool and nightime warm,
So as to make it 100% energy self-sustaining with no infrastructure connection?
If you live in a more temperate climate, what might be better still is if you used a heat pump to move summer heat out of your home and into the sand battery. Instead of using your AC to just "dump" the unwanted heat outdoors, save it up for the months when you wish you had some of it, then cycle it back inside when you need it. Waste not, want not?