Today is all about using green energy. There are several sources available, and for now, researchers are still searching for more ways to provide power with the use of natural resources. Some have opted for solar energy, and as for Finland, they have discovered another source.
The innovative sand battery may just be the answer to the world’s energy woes. This material has so much to offer to its users. Plus, it comes with a lot of perks. Sand has the power to store and provide powerful energy to the people around.
A town in Finland has opted to break boundaries and make use of sand to store heat that comes from renewable energies. Their goal was to gain access to home heating during the winter season. This works for them extremely well because water heating can only store 100°C of heat. Sand, on the other hand, has the capacity to reach 500°C, or nearly 1000° in Fahrenheit.
This works by heating tens of thousands of cubic meters of sand. They get this heat from the generation of electricity that come from their solar panels and wind turbines. The sand is packed tightly in insulated silos. This is where they are able to keep the heat in for months at a time, and the best part is that the heat stays. For the Finnish people who live through a 5-month long winters, this does a lot to help the power grid supply the people around.
The company behind this great invention is called Polar Night Energy. Their invention is also able to make use of heat to generate electricity aside from heating. Their first ever commercial sand-based heat storage facility has already been purchased. It’s now operational, thanks to Vatajankoski, which is an energy utility found in Western Finland.
Just in July of 2022, the facility has been prepared and primed for the debut of the commercial winter in Vatajankoski’s district heating network in Kankaanpää, Finland. The storage found there has 100 kilowatts of heating power with 8 megawatt hours capacity.
For governments found in Europe who have witnessed the energy crisis at its worst, the sand tech has several attractive elements. The investment made costs less than 10 euro per kilowatt hour of capacity. More importantly, the sand battery has little to no emissions or hazardous materials, and very low, automated running costs.
According to the company, this new solution allows the up-scaling of solar or wind energy to as much as a hundred percent of heating and electricity demand. The very core of their solution is the high-temperature large scale heat storage that’s already been patented.
The secret is the extremely hot sand they use as storage medium. They are able to change electricity to heat, and then store it for later. Because it’s sand, operation is safe and there is a natural balance in the storage cycle. The best part is that sand is abundant and cheap. It can also be heated up to 1000 °C and even higher. Inside the sand, they have created their heat transfer system that allows efficient energy transportation coming in and out of the storage. With the proper insulation, they have ensured long storing period that can last up to months and with very minimal heat losses.
Of course, the size of the storages may differ from tens to thousands of cubic meters. They are also able to build a storage underground so that minimal space is used from the construction sites, as this can also be valuable.
The CO2 emissions from the storage are embedded emissions made from construction materials and from the construction phase. These embedded emissions of the PNE heat storage are considered minor, which means that the emissions of produced heat come mostly from the source of electricity. With the process, the heat taken coming from the storage is clean. In fact, it’s as clean as the electricity being fed into it.
Heat storage is part and parcel of any energy system. It’s the same from a heating network of a single building and a large district heating network. It also doesn’t change for a self-contained electricity and heating system that islands use.
Basically, this means that the heat storages are individually tailored. This will be based on the requirements and operation logic of each client. Polar Night Energy can design both individual heat storages and full energy systems. Their designs allow high renewable fractions at affordable prices.
Plus, their storages are have been made based on simulations using COMSOL Multiphysics software. This means that their systems make use of 3D transient heat transport models and with the use of real-life input and output data.
Right now, Polar Night Energy has a 3 MWh running test pilot in Hiedanranta, Tampere. This has already been connected to a local district heating grid as it provides energy to the buildings in the area. The pilot has allowed them to test, validate, and optimize heat storage solution. In the pilot they created, part of the energy comes from a 100 square meter solar panel array and the other portion comes from the electric grid in the area.
BBC has reported on this and they say that the Finnish energy authorities are seriously considering to scale the solution from 8MWh to 8GWh “This innovation is a part of the smart and green energy transition. Heat storages can significantly help to increase intermittent renewables in the electrical grid,” said Markku Ylönen. He is the co-founder of Polar Night Energy. “At the same time we can prime the waste heat to usable level to heat a city. This is a logical step towards combustion-free heat production,” he also added
The Finland’s Government’s recent decision to join NATO has had an impact on them. They have lost all access to Russian natural gas, which was their standard home heating energy source. Hence, this solution came at just the perfect time.
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