Finland’s radical answer to renewable energy’s biggest headache: The world’s largest sand battery

It’s interesting piece of technology, but it’s not ‘radical’. The company behind the storage has done their homework and they seem to be well engineered, but the “technology” itself is pretty much as old as bonfires, people have used hot rocks to heat up tents for ‘a while’.

But sand has pretty good thermal properties and size of these new iterations of old tech makes them pretty decent solution for energy storage with renewables. I’ve been following various ‘sand battery’ products for our own house, but the main problem with all of them tends to be the size required. In practise for our own house we’d need a sand battery roughly the size of 6m storage container (with heat pumps and all the other hardware) and that’d be so expensive that the investment wouldn’t pay itself back in my lifetime.

The main material could be smashed/pulverized glass. The stoage of direct renewable electricity to heat makes the cost (Overall, including climate responsibilities) more appealing when considered along the same lines as Solar panels, or concentrated solar - using a FPS converter that can utilized that direct heat to generate heat back into electricity makes the project a bit of a challenge, but overall a pragmatic solution for long term use cases. Build up in tight spaces and consider alternate uses like wind sheilds and parking spaces when it comes to space conformance. 🤔 I hear aircrete is an insulation thats already prevalent in europe is this true?