The largest "sand battery" in the world

Finland has just switched on the world's largest sand battery and put district heating in the hands of a thermal reservoir capable of storing energy for months, the promise is direct, up to 70% reduction in local system emissions with on-demand heat, even when there is no wind and the sun disappears.

</p Basically what I did is this, Polar Night Energy installed an industrial TES, thermal energy storage about 13 meters high and 15 m wide, 10 times larger than the company's first commercial sand battery.

</p With a capacity of 100 MW hour, it has been in operation since June, taking over the function of an old wood chip plant and already heating municipal buildings such as the town hall. The idea is to use surplus energy from wind and solar at cheap times.

Main results:

Round trip efficiency around 90%, enough heat for about a week of city use.

Possibility of maintaining the load for long periods, smoothing demand peaks.

In the first days of optimization, the system already exceeded the internal performance goals, a good sign for the municipal scale, I am going to explain it simply, when there is excess electricity, a closed air circuit heats the sand inside an insulated silo up to 600º, the sand retains that heat for a long enough time.

When it comes to use, the air passes through the bed, exits at 400º and feeds heat exchangers that heat water for district heating or generate steam for industrial processes.

It is important to note that this TES does not supply direct electricity, it is stored heat, the company is studying converting part of that heat into electricity using a steam turbine, but that would reduce overall efficiency.

In practice the results are shown and the limits can be extended in the future with new technologies; In municipalities with a cold climate they gain a cheap thermal lung made of abundant material, capable of combining intermittent renewable energy with winter and mid-season demand.

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