The world's largest sand battery

The sand battery, designed by startup Polar Night Energy, will be built over the next 13 months in Pornainen, Finland, to meet year-round heating needs.

Once built, the company estimates the new battery could reduce annual carbon dioxide emissions by 70%. The new sand battery is a 13-meter-high, 15-meter-wide tank filled with crushed soapstone (which conducts heat better than regular sand) and heat transfer tubes. The plan is to use a process called resistance heating to convert excess energy from wind and solar power to heat, IFL Science reported on March 11.

The process heats the air, which is then circulated through the tank via heat pipes, warming the crushed soapstone surrounding it. When conventional energy sources become expensive, as they do during the winter months, the heated air can be fed into the district heating system.

The sand battery under construction in Pornainen is not the first version. Polar Night Energy previously installed the world’s first fully operational commercial sand battery in Kankaanpää, Finland, in 2022. But the latest version will be 10 times larger, with a heating capacity of one megawatt and the ability to store up to 100 megawatts of thermal energy, enough to meet the district’s heating needs for a week in winter and nearly a month in summer.

While the world is looking to increase renewable energy storage capacity with many costly and environmentally damaging solutions, sand batteries like the one above could become a cheap and low-impact solution, according to Polar Night Energy. In addition to the sand battery project, Finland is also preparing to turn an abandoned mine into a giant gravity battery.

An Khang (According to IFL Science )

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