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Science & Tech.
Mahesh

25/12/22 08:51 AM IST

Sand battery

In News
  • Finnish researchers have installed the world's first fully working "sand battery" which can store green power for months at a time.
Sand Battery
  • A “sand battery” is a high temperature thermal energy storage that uses sand or sand-like materials as its storage medium. It stores energy in sand as heat.
  • Sand is a very effective medium for retaining heat over a long period, storing power for months at a time.
  • The sand has a very long lifetime: it can heat up and cool off any number of times.
  • It will get denser after a while so needs less space.
  • The battery has a four metres wide and seven metres high steel container with 100 tonnes of recycled sand.
  • The ‘silo’ supplies warm water to a district heating network connected to both resident and commercial buildings.
  • Its main purpose is to work as a high-power and high-capacity reservoir for excess wind and solar energy. The energy is stored as heat, which can be used to heat homes, or to provide hot steam and high temperature process heat to industries that are often fossil-fuel dependent.
  • The sand battery helps to ambitiously upscale renewables production by ensuring there’s always a way to benefit from clean energy, even if the surplus is massive.
  • The latest battery model can store up to 8 megawatt-hours of energy as heat.
  • The reservoir is so well-insulated from the outer environment that it can retain temperatures up to 600 degrees Celsius and prevent heat losses over time.  
Why these sand Batteries?
  • The innovation comes at a time when Europe is facing an unprecedented energy crisis.
  • Russia — the supplier of 40 per cent of the European Union’s natural gas supply — has shut off its pipelines to a large extent.
  • Countries in the Northern Hemisphere rely on a central heating system in winters, with natural gas as the most common heating fuel. This is unlike developing countries with a tropical climate.
  • The sale of heat pumps, considered a renewable source of internal heating, rose by 35 per cent in the EU.
  • A rise in the sale of other controversial alternatives, such as wood pellets, accompanied this simultaneously.
  • The world is increasingly looking at renewable internal heating sources.
Source- DTE

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