MsN reported on July 6 that homes in the western Finnish city of Kamkampay and local swimming pools will soon use a commercial sand energy storage power supply system known as sand batteries. The system, developed by a Finnish startup, works by storing solar heat in the sand and becoming a new type of battery at high temperatures, when it comes to low temperatures or at night.
Sand can store solar energy is actually very easy to understand, as long as you step on the hot sand or sand in the summer, you understand that the heat energy left in the sand after solar radiation should be quite a lot, so the project to study storing these natural heat energy as batteries is being carried out in several countries at the same time, and the Finnish startup , Polar Night Energy ( Polar Night Energy ) was the first to achieve. Markku Ylönen, co-founder of the company, said: "This innovation is part of the smart and green energy transition. "They are also confident in making this project a fully operational commercial scale project."
As the price of fossil fuels rises globally, there has been increasing investment in renewable energy in recent years, but the key to these projects is how to store energy derived from natural resources such as wind and solar for future use. The Finnish high sand battery heat storage system was installed earlier this year and put into service in May 2022. Their sand batteries use the working principle of "resistance heating", which is heated by heating the resistive element, vibrating the particles inside the element and heating up. These resistive elements heat sand to more than 500 degrees Celsius, and the resulting hot air circulates through a series of pipes in a sand-filled heat storage vessel that stores this thermal energy for months.
When electricity demand is high and supply is insufficient, sand battery systems can drain hot air into a heat exchanger, heat up the water, and then send hot water to networked residential buildings for heating. The total amount of sand is now on a downward trend globally, but it is still one of the important resources. This ubiquitous raw material energy storage capacity is 4 times that of water, how to make full use of it is the efforts of all countries, Finland if this winter can successfully achieve sand battery work, then it is undoubtedly a good start.
This article is the subject of: Ginger Emperor Penguin. Edited by: Hanqingguan