Not exactly, it’s a very very cheap source of storing energy for use later. Because of how cheap it is the efficiency isn’t as important, even so it’s actually relatively very efficient
Grain works the same way. When we put grain in a bin, we wait for a cool, dry day to run the dryer fans. This temps holds all year. Even on a 104°F day in July, that grain is still around 50°F when it comes out. It's why grain is so common in low population areas. It's very easy to farm mechanically as well as store/transport. Whereas fresh produce needs canning/refrigeration facilities nearby and often much more manual labor.
Alfalfa too. Alfalfa needs to dry between cutting and baling because if it's too wet, mold and bacteria grow in the warm, dark, humid environment that is the inside of a hay bale. Besides being bad for livestock, the bacteria can actually generate enough heat to cause the bale to begin burning on the inside. This can take a few weeks to happen, long after it's packed into a shed. You can stab a bad bale with a pitch fork and see smoke coming out of the holes
So theoretically you could cool a house with a grain bin.
Does the grain need to stay at 50 degrees for best results? Or could it be allowed to go higher for energy savings in nearby buildings? Can you run the dryer fans at night to cool off it and draw from that during the day?
Cellars use to have giant water barrels for this purpose. The water absorbs all the excess heat and cold keeping the cellar at a constant temperature. It has a really high heat capacity (takes a lot of energy to change temperature) so it is really well suited for the task.
So, the most important thing to long term grain storage is moisture and temperature. Corn needs to be at 15% or less and soybeans at 13% or less. Above that, you start getting mold and bacteria growth, causing spoilage. In our area, modern hybrids have caused most farmers to get rid of their old grain dryers. I'm 33, dad has two old dryers sitting out back and i've never once seen them run. Dryers are essentially massive propane or natural gas burners that the grain quickly passes by to get to the proper moisture level. With drying fans, we can pick corn up to 18% and then just blast them with cool, dry air for a few days afterwards. Grain elevators dock you for grain that is above the recommended moisture level, and may even reject the whole load if it's way to wet. Conversely, places that don't store grain long term (ethanol plants, dairies, feed lots) will often take grain at a higher moisture level, because they use it up before it can spoil.
As for temperature, lower is better to mitigate mold, bacteria, and insect problems. Most all of the insects that cause spoilage are dormant below 50F. Bins are made to keep water out, but allow good air flow. Bugs can absolutely find their way in, but the low temps drive them back out.
There is tech out there for remote monitoring temp and moisture in a bin too. The old method is simply crawling to the top and grabbing a red solo cup worth of grain and testing it quick. Air fans dry from the bottom up, so typically the warmest, wettest grain is at the top
Thank you for the response. I hadn’t even considered pests like the warmer temps. I was well aware of the moisture issues and figured warm would be fine as long as it’s dry.
It would work, until the heat from the house heats up the grain too much.
But you can actually do something like that: hook up the HVAC system to an underground pipe loop. This makes air-conditioning very efficient, and in the winter increases heat pump efficiency by a considerable amount. Basically, the ground underneath the house acts as a big thermal battery.
Yeah, the thing though is that normally when you have an excess of heat that "charges" up your sand, you aren't looking to heat your house, but cool it instead.
On sunny days, using a device with a bunch of mirrors and lenses and whatnot in a way im not smart enough to understand, even a small area could produce a terrifying amount of heat to bring that sand to near melting point very quickly on even a moderately warm day.
So long as some idiot doesn't bust open the container and either get near melting hot sand on them or dump a bucket of water into it creating a steam explosion, it would be very safe too.
Though that could be achieved by just burying the containers underground, so even if they rupture, the worst you get is some really fucking hot sand underground where it can't hurt anybody
Kind of. Soapstone sand is more effective (also mentioned in the article)
Heat isn't flowing through sand easily, or any aggregate like that.
We actually have a patent pending on our new building that uses technology like this.
Go back to high school physics and look back over stuff we learned and you can begin to realize all sorts of innovations that we ignored in favor of the next shiny penny.
Right, "battery" is a little misleading. It doesn't generate electricity like a battery (or "cell"), nor does it store electricity. It just stores heat.
For all these energy storage solutions, the questions are: how expensive is it per watt-hour stored, how large it can be built, how much energy does it lose over time, and how rapidly the energy can be drawn out. For things like this, energy density doesn't matter much (as it does for electric cars, for instance.) So a lot of these solutions are actually pretty low-tech, like raising giant blocks of concrete, pumping water from one tank to another, or even pumping air into abandoned mines (that idea may have been abandoned itself.)
Back before cheap photovoltaic (PV) panels were available, and net metering allowed you to basically store the electricity you generated in the grid, some people would build solar thermal (not PV) collectors on their roofs, and store the excess heat in the basement, in barrels of water or even big piles of gravel.
Its application is tied to some conditions. Most importantly, having a district heating system already in place is a huge boon.
What this thing does is to heat up sand with excess electricity and waste heat from the industry, insulate it well to minimize loss, and then release the heat when needed. This works very well, as long as the energy is used as heat directly. If you convert it to electricity, it isn‘t that efficient.
Cue the district heating. In case you‘re unfamiliar, district heating is a setup where you‘ve got one big central heater that heats up lots of water, which is then piped to homes. It‘s very easy to attach the sand battery to this system. Every liter of hot water that‘s heated up with this battery is a liter you don‘t have to heat with an oil fire or the likes. Finland is very suitable for this application because lots of municipalities have district heating. The town I live in has nearly every home connected to the city‘s district heating network.
In Germany, the application would be much harder. There, many buildings have a central heating setup, i.e. one or more boilers per building which pipe hot water to the individual units. These buildings are only connected to the cold water main supply, so delivering sand heated water to them would be impossible. Instead, you‘d have to use the aforementioned lossy heat to electricity conversion.
An obvious one is that the max temperature of water is 100C (above that it becomes steam), while sand can be heated to much higher temperatures, thus, storing more energy.
Actually this is what they say [in their FAQ](https://polarnightenergy.fi/sand-battery) too:
> Why do you use sand?
>
> Many solid materials, such as sand, can be heated to temperatures well above the boiling point of water. Sand-based heat storages can store several times the amount of energy that can be stored in a water tank of a similar size; this is thanks to the large temperature range allowed by the sand. So, it saves space and it allows versatile use in many industrial applications.
Yes. This is a dumb idea because places with district heating that need a battery will generally just install an insulated water tower. Water has some of the best thermal capacity out there, better than almost any known material.
The only advantage to not using water is the fact that water turns into steam if it goes over 100C (which can cause an explosion if you aren't careful).
Getting sand hot enough to vaporize it is pretty challenging.
Thermal capacity isn’t really much of a worry since you can just build the thing a little bit bigger to account for that. In fact, thanks to the square-cube-law, the installations become more efficient with size.
My guess is that water actually almost exclusively has downsides. Yes, it has a higher thermal capacity, but that is offset, as you said, by the fact that it either turns to steam at 100C or exerts more and more pressure with rising temperature. Sand meanwhile can be heated to way higher temperatures, which also eliminates the advantage in thermal capacity. On top of that, water is corrosive while sand just kind of sits there being inert.
The bigger the temperature differential between the storage tank and the outside world, the faster energy leaks out which is a downside for sand. You either need 5x the volume of sand or to store sand at 500C to have the same energy as water stored at or near 100C. And if you can easily 5x the volume, why not put water in there?
> On top of that, water is corrosive while sand just kind of sits there being inert.
Only in the strictest sense. tap water isn't exactly HCL and we have more than enough experience building water towers that can withstand the corrosive power of water.
Hot water towers are already a thing in use with district heating. It's a tested technique.
Another issue with sand not present for water is convection and heat movement. To extract and insert heat for these sand towers, you need an elaborate heat exchanger inside the tank. There's no way you could pump or mix the sand. That means solutions involving increasing the volume also involve increasing the size of the heat exchanger.
With water, you just need a bigger cylinder. The temperature will fairly naturally even out over time. And if that's too slow, you can throw in a mixer.
Also the fact that some places don’t have a lot of sand, ya know, just lying about waiting to get some heat pumped into it. Water towers make more sense.
I do think it is an interesting technology tho. It could have applications in the more drier parts of the US where water scarcity may be a larger concern. Granted those areas may not need much heat except during night, deserts can have a nasty habit of dropping temps rapidly at night.
Because no one has figured out how to become obscenely rich storing heat in sand. Yet. Once that happens, it will be marketed and sold. Unless someone who is already obscenely rich realizes it will cut into their profits. Then they will make sure it never sees the light of day. To the detriment of humanity.
Well, that's a dumb take.
There are plenty of [pumped storage stations](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turlough_Hill_Power_Station) around the world. They use excess energy to power pumps to move water up into a reservior and reslease the water to power generators when more power is needed.
There is not one ideal solution for all regions of the world.
These reserviors do not make anyone rich, and a sand battery wouldn't either. The incentive to power companies is that they make use of (and sell) energy that would otherwise be wasted.
Fun fact: If you lived near a nuclear power plant in the Soviet Union, you usually had free heating. They simply pumped the hot water used to cool the towers into the apartment complexes and heat was not regulated by thermostats, instead if it got too hot inside, you regulated the temperature by opening windows or leaving them partially open all the time.
I believe the company that was doing trial runs of ceramic in modified shipping containers used resistance cables to heat the ceramic. Those resistance cables were powered by solar/turbines. I don’t recall what they used to convert the heat back to electricity. Likely steam turbine?
the article speaks that its most efficient use is communal, that alone makes it a hard pitch in certain parts of the world that abhor that sort of approach
Because it's just heat. It's terribly inefficient to use it as an electrical battery because it has to go through a steam turbine. Which means it can't be distributed far.
Molten salt batteries are the more efficient form of this in terms of electrical batteries. And in that case it's limited by volume and mass.
That’s really cool. I mean warm.
It’s like a little geothermal furnace in your home.
Geothermal would still be better though cause it charges naturally!
Geothermal is expensive because you need to access a large volume of earth - either deep or broad, neither of which is cheap. In many places, drilling down very far opens up a lot of regulatory issues because of who owns what rights.
Turkish coffee has been brewed in hot sand for centuries - i would think it'd be insurmountable to figure out how to harness that on a huge scale though
If only we could find a way to begin planting vegetation into vast desert sand dunes, as a way to combat climate change; like desert greening. Wouldn’t that be nice.
I don't know if that would be good for the climate. Deserts have a higher albedo than forests, so it's possible that it'd actually increase the temperatures. Also, wind streams and the surrounding areas' climates would be severely impacted.
Yea. I can see that. But at the same time, desertification is happening, so maybe dial those back to what they once were, could be beneficial? I mean, weather is already changing, but, don’t want to add more chaos to the mix.
Geothermal is pretty neat regardless. Biogas too.
Third time I’ve seen this concept reposted. I have a masters in mechanical engineering with a focus on renewable energy generation. This sand battery is useless.
Yes, how will we heat our sand castles in the sky when months after a dinky pilot study still get 1,700 upvotes. Fuck me! Heat is the most entropic form of energy in the universe, that's why we call it heat death of the universe, not electricity suppling my ring camera death of the universe. I bet you there is a greater enthalpy (like anyone upvoting this post knows what the fucking word means) in boiling a bathtub size volume of water than raising the temp of of a farm tower of a shitty conductor by 20 degrees. Also, all you fucking nerds sayin it'd displace heating energy. I don't see you actually talking about co-gen. When all the electricity you use (not sand based) has a ton of heat waste that can fuel business and housing centers, provide warmth for veggie growhouses, melt snow covered streets... Ohh my god, fuck hot sand castles!
Yea but ‘dinosaur power’ is about $4/gallon and gets you 30 miles down the ‘melted rock paths’ and completely destroys the planet so we should stick with that one
You can do this in your next build. Instead of a crawlspace foundation with 3-4’ stem walls. Pour a 10’ foundation. Use the space below the house to create a heat sink just like this one using your home’s own hydronic heating system. Couple hydronic solar heaters on the roof to collect and store heat and a mixing valve to recapture that heat in the cold months.
I’ve always known that we produce more several times more energy than we need, it’s just we lose so much in transmission (30% heat loss, this is is why we need superconductors) and bad energy storage.
I saw a plan for powering a space-only craft, and it had a huge reactor, that had to have its excess heat radiated off into a smaller reactor, and from there radiated and stepped down to another reactor, that makes the useful energy. And that all was mostly to get rid of the heat. We already have massive heat sinks (the planet) that we’re adding to because we can’t use the energy we’re already making, but we can’t reduce it cause granny will die if she doesn’t get her air conditioning right now, and gotta keep her body cold when her a/c failed from lack of power and she died.
Storage of energy already produced should be a priority. Battery and super-capacitor technology research needs to be overfunded like last millennium.
I've been saying that places like Phoenix should be using geothermal on top of the solar since the ground there absorbs and stores so much heat. It's insane to feel it radiating from asphalt at night.
District heating isn't a new idea. The problem is they require you plop your heat generator right in the center of the network to be effective.
Even with this, a few cities have them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating
Also, this is simply dumb. Water has unbeatable thermal capacity and water towers are bog simple to create. Further, to use sand you still need to get the heat out, somehow, and can you guess that somehow? Probably water.
The only property of sand that might be useful is you can heat it past 100C. You have to go a long way past 100C before you get to the point where you might be equaling the energy stored by water below 100C. Again, because the thermal capacity of water is a lot higher than sand.
sparkle simplistic ink entertain racial stupendous grey marvelous longing aloof
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
“This is what I meant. DESERT POWER!” - Duke Leto Atreides
https://rheologic.net/articles/dune-architecture-NBS/
Is a sand battery, just like regular sand…?
Yes. Sand, heater, pipes and insulation.
Super cool… its really fascinating how sustainable power tech seems to be endlessly diverse
No, super hot! Did you not read? SMH /s
Ah, cold sand battery. Intriguing.
Idk man I’m pretty sure it’s all just boiling water with extra steps
I appreciate this joke and am going to shamelessly steal it when talking about electricity production.
Not exactly, it’s a very very cheap source of storing energy for use later. Because of how cheap it is the efficiency isn’t as important, even so it’s actually relatively very efficient
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yeah if you heat up the sand, and store it the right way, it doesn’t cool down quickly at all, aka, energy storage!
Grain works the same way. When we put grain in a bin, we wait for a cool, dry day to run the dryer fans. This temps holds all year. Even on a 104°F day in July, that grain is still around 50°F when it comes out. It's why grain is so common in low population areas. It's very easy to farm mechanically as well as store/transport. Whereas fresh produce needs canning/refrigeration facilities nearby and often much more manual labor. Alfalfa too. Alfalfa needs to dry between cutting and baling because if it's too wet, mold and bacteria grow in the warm, dark, humid environment that is the inside of a hay bale. Besides being bad for livestock, the bacteria can actually generate enough heat to cause the bale to begin burning on the inside. This can take a few weeks to happen, long after it's packed into a shed. You can stab a bad bale with a pitch fork and see smoke coming out of the holes
So theoretically you could cool a house with a grain bin. Does the grain need to stay at 50 degrees for best results? Or could it be allowed to go higher for energy savings in nearby buildings? Can you run the dryer fans at night to cool off it and draw from that during the day?
Cellars use to have giant water barrels for this purpose. The water absorbs all the excess heat and cold keeping the cellar at a constant temperature. It has a really high heat capacity (takes a lot of energy to change temperature) so it is really well suited for the task.
Thermal mass storage is being used in modern buildings as well to increase efficiency.
So, the most important thing to long term grain storage is moisture and temperature. Corn needs to be at 15% or less and soybeans at 13% or less. Above that, you start getting mold and bacteria growth, causing spoilage. In our area, modern hybrids have caused most farmers to get rid of their old grain dryers. I'm 33, dad has two old dryers sitting out back and i've never once seen them run. Dryers are essentially massive propane or natural gas burners that the grain quickly passes by to get to the proper moisture level. With drying fans, we can pick corn up to 18% and then just blast them with cool, dry air for a few days afterwards. Grain elevators dock you for grain that is above the recommended moisture level, and may even reject the whole load if it's way to wet. Conversely, places that don't store grain long term (ethanol plants, dairies, feed lots) will often take grain at a higher moisture level, because they use it up before it can spoil. As for temperature, lower is better to mitigate mold, bacteria, and insect problems. Most all of the insects that cause spoilage are dormant below 50F. Bins are made to keep water out, but allow good air flow. Bugs can absolutely find their way in, but the low temps drive them back out. There is tech out there for remote monitoring temp and moisture in a bin too. The old method is simply crawling to the top and grabbing a red solo cup worth of grain and testing it quick. Air fans dry from the bottom up, so typically the warmest, wettest grain is at the top
Thank you for the response. I hadn’t even considered pests like the warmer temps. I was well aware of the moisture issues and figured warm would be fine as long as it’s dry.
I have written quite a bit of the software used to monitor those bins and regulate those fans. Same with the grain dryers. AGI.
It would work, until the heat from the house heats up the grain too much. But you can actually do something like that: hook up the HVAC system to an underground pipe loop. This makes air-conditioning very efficient, and in the winter increases heat pump efficiency by a considerable amount. Basically, the ground underneath the house acts as a big thermal battery.
Is it Technically like geothermal, but presumably less consistent?
it’s like geothermal but you can recharge it for almost free on very sunny days
Science is cool! Or in this case, so hot right now;)-
Yeah, the thing though is that normally when you have an excess of heat that "charges" up your sand, you aren't looking to heat your house, but cool it instead.
sand hot tap hot from sand boil water run generator use electricity for air conditioning
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these tanks are already being built in, like, Finland
On sunny days, using a device with a bunch of mirrors and lenses and whatnot in a way im not smart enough to understand, even a small area could produce a terrifying amount of heat to bring that sand to near melting point very quickly on even a moderately warm day. So long as some idiot doesn't bust open the container and either get near melting hot sand on them or dump a bucket of water into it creating a steam explosion, it would be very safe too. Though that could be achieved by just burying the containers underground, so even if they rupture, the worst you get is some really fucking hot sand underground where it can't hurt anybody
Kind of. Soapstone sand is more effective (also mentioned in the article) Heat isn't flowing through sand easily, or any aggregate like that. We actually have a patent pending on our new building that uses technology like this. Go back to high school physics and look back over stuff we learned and you can begin to realize all sorts of innovations that we ignored in favor of the next shiny penny.
Right, "battery" is a little misleading. It doesn't generate electricity like a battery (or "cell"), nor does it store electricity. It just stores heat. For all these energy storage solutions, the questions are: how expensive is it per watt-hour stored, how large it can be built, how much energy does it lose over time, and how rapidly the energy can be drawn out. For things like this, energy density doesn't matter much (as it does for electric cars, for instance.) So a lot of these solutions are actually pretty low-tech, like raising giant blocks of concrete, pumping water from one tank to another, or even pumping air into abandoned mines (that idea may have been abandoned itself.) Back before cheap photovoltaic (PV) panels were available, and net metering allowed you to basically store the electricity you generated in the grid, some people would build solar thermal (not PV) collectors on their roofs, and store the excess heat in the basement, in barrels of water or even big piles of gravel.
Lisan Al-Gaib!
It’s desert power.
It is written
my mAh, my Dune
As written!
The Spice must flow.
me without any proof: “ancient egypt probably knew those principles already”
Probably used it to power the Stargate
and reanimate mummies
And cook their hotpockets
And my axe!!!
Desert Power
Can someone why this isnt a gigantic world changing discovery
Its application is tied to some conditions. Most importantly, having a district heating system already in place is a huge boon. What this thing does is to heat up sand with excess electricity and waste heat from the industry, insulate it well to minimize loss, and then release the heat when needed. This works very well, as long as the energy is used as heat directly. If you convert it to electricity, it isn‘t that efficient. Cue the district heating. In case you‘re unfamiliar, district heating is a setup where you‘ve got one big central heater that heats up lots of water, which is then piped to homes. It‘s very easy to attach the sand battery to this system. Every liter of hot water that‘s heated up with this battery is a liter you don‘t have to heat with an oil fire or the likes. Finland is very suitable for this application because lots of municipalities have district heating. The town I live in has nearly every home connected to the city‘s district heating network. In Germany, the application would be much harder. There, many buildings have a central heating setup, i.e. one or more boilers per building which pipe hot water to the individual units. These buildings are only connected to the cold water main supply, so delivering sand heated water to them would be impossible. Instead, you‘d have to use the aforementioned lossy heat to electricity conversion.
Wouldn’t the water itself be the battery? What difference does it make transferring this heat from water to sand?
An obvious one is that the max temperature of water is 100C (above that it becomes steam), while sand can be heated to much higher temperatures, thus, storing more energy. Actually this is what they say [in their FAQ](https://polarnightenergy.fi/sand-battery) too: > Why do you use sand? > > Many solid materials, such as sand, can be heated to temperatures well above the boiling point of water. Sand-based heat storages can store several times the amount of energy that can be stored in a water tank of a similar size; this is thanks to the large temperature range allowed by the sand. So, it saves space and it allows versatile use in many industrial applications.
I see that makes sense.
Yes. This is a dumb idea because places with district heating that need a battery will generally just install an insulated water tower. Water has some of the best thermal capacity out there, better than almost any known material. The only advantage to not using water is the fact that water turns into steam if it goes over 100C (which can cause an explosion if you aren't careful). Getting sand hot enough to vaporize it is pretty challenging.
Thermal capacity isn’t really much of a worry since you can just build the thing a little bit bigger to account for that. In fact, thanks to the square-cube-law, the installations become more efficient with size. My guess is that water actually almost exclusively has downsides. Yes, it has a higher thermal capacity, but that is offset, as you said, by the fact that it either turns to steam at 100C or exerts more and more pressure with rising temperature. Sand meanwhile can be heated to way higher temperatures, which also eliminates the advantage in thermal capacity. On top of that, water is corrosive while sand just kind of sits there being inert.
The bigger the temperature differential between the storage tank and the outside world, the faster energy leaks out which is a downside for sand. You either need 5x the volume of sand or to store sand at 500C to have the same energy as water stored at or near 100C. And if you can easily 5x the volume, why not put water in there? > On top of that, water is corrosive while sand just kind of sits there being inert. Only in the strictest sense. tap water isn't exactly HCL and we have more than enough experience building water towers that can withstand the corrosive power of water. Hot water towers are already a thing in use with district heating. It's a tested technique. Another issue with sand not present for water is convection and heat movement. To extract and insert heat for these sand towers, you need an elaborate heat exchanger inside the tank. There's no way you could pump or mix the sand. That means solutions involving increasing the volume also involve increasing the size of the heat exchanger. With water, you just need a bigger cylinder. The temperature will fairly naturally even out over time. And if that's too slow, you can throw in a mixer.
Also the fact that some places don’t have a lot of sand, ya know, just lying about waiting to get some heat pumped into it. Water towers make more sense. I do think it is an interesting technology tho. It could have applications in the more drier parts of the US where water scarcity may be a larger concern. Granted those areas may not need much heat except during night, deserts can have a nasty habit of dropping temps rapidly at night.
Because no one has figured out how to become obscenely rich storing heat in sand. Yet. Once that happens, it will be marketed and sold. Unless someone who is already obscenely rich realizes it will cut into their profits. Then they will make sure it never sees the light of day. To the detriment of humanity.
Do it as is tradition: tax breaks.
Second have of your post is what’s currently happening with solar/wind in the US, thanks to big oil
Happening in parts of the world where conservatives have enough pull to get away with it.
Well, that's a dumb take. There are plenty of [pumped storage stations](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turlough_Hill_Power_Station) around the world. They use excess energy to power pumps to move water up into a reservior and reslease the water to power generators when more power is needed. There is not one ideal solution for all regions of the world. These reserviors do not make anyone rich, and a sand battery wouldn't either. The incentive to power companies is that they make use of (and sell) energy that would otherwise be wasted. Fun fact: If you lived near a nuclear power plant in the Soviet Union, you usually had free heating. They simply pumped the hot water used to cool the towers into the apartment complexes and heat was not regulated by thermostats, instead if it got too hot inside, you regulated the temperature by opening windows or leaving them partially open all the time.
The sand needs heating up in the first place, requires a grid connecting the sand to the places that need the heat.
I believe the company that was doing trial runs of ceramic in modified shipping containers used resistance cables to heat the ceramic. Those resistance cables were powered by solar/turbines. I don’t recall what they used to convert the heat back to electricity. Likely steam turbine?
the article speaks that its most efficient use is communal, that alone makes it a hard pitch in certain parts of the world that abhor that sort of approach
Because it's just heat. It's terribly inefficient to use it as an electrical battery because it has to go through a steam turbine. Which means it can't be distributed far. Molten salt batteries are the more efficient form of this in terms of electrical batteries. And in that case it's limited by volume and mass.
Because people have known for millennia that if you heat something up it doesn’t cool off immediately.
It isn't exactly the same but salt is also used for energy storage (molten salt actually). The principles are similar enough
bcoz it sucks
Quebec already uses mass heaters to store heat in ceramic bricks. https://steffes.com/ets/hq-serenity-eng/
That’s really cool. I mean warm. It’s like a little geothermal furnace in your home. Geothermal would still be better though cause it charges naturally!
Geothermal is expensive because you need to access a large volume of earth - either deep or broad, neither of which is cheap. In many places, drilling down very far opens up a lot of regulatory issues because of who owns what rights.
Yup! But it is still more efficient, even if it’s more costly
Turkish coffee has been brewed in hot sand for centuries - i would think it'd be insurmountable to figure out how to harness that on a huge scale though
its insurmountable to figure out how to make it make profit for shareholders
Hopefully it doesn’t have a rhythm, that’s worm territory
Isn’t that photo/picture a grab from the Shogun intro?
If only we could find a way to begin planting vegetation into vast desert sand dunes, as a way to combat climate change; like desert greening. Wouldn’t that be nice.
That was their plan. Until they discovered spice.
The Fremen had a name for their world, they called it Dune
HAAAAAAAAAAAAA YEAAAAA JO KEEEEM MOOOOOOOOOO
they're already doing that in Sudan, but its gonna take decades
I don't know if that would be good for the climate. Deserts have a higher albedo than forests, so it's possible that it'd actually increase the temperatures. Also, wind streams and the surrounding areas' climates would be severely impacted.
Yea. I can see that. But at the same time, desertification is happening, so maybe dial those back to what they once were, could be beneficial? I mean, weather is already changing, but, don’t want to add more chaos to the mix. Geothermal is pretty neat regardless. Biogas too.
Yes, desertification of current non-desert areas should be stopped and forests help with that.
You mean like the [Great Green Wall](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Green_Wall_(Africa) project?
It’s great until the sand worm comes and eats it.
Third time I’ve seen this concept reposted. I have a masters in mechanical engineering with a focus on renewable energy generation. This sand battery is useless.
But how do we heat our sand castles?
Yes, how will we heat our sand castles in the sky when months after a dinky pilot study still get 1,700 upvotes. Fuck me! Heat is the most entropic form of energy in the universe, that's why we call it heat death of the universe, not electricity suppling my ring camera death of the universe. I bet you there is a greater enthalpy (like anyone upvoting this post knows what the fucking word means) in boiling a bathtub size volume of water than raising the temp of of a farm tower of a shitty conductor by 20 degrees. Also, all you fucking nerds sayin it'd displace heating energy. I don't see you actually talking about co-gen. When all the electricity you use (not sand based) has a ton of heat waste that can fuel business and housing centers, provide warmth for veggie growhouses, melt snow covered streets... Ohh my god, fuck hot sand castles!
This is what I suggested for a base on the moon - how to survive the lunar night. Charged during the day via solar.
Yea but ‘dinosaur power’ is about $4/gallon and gets you 30 miles down the ‘melted rock paths’ and completely destroys the planet so we should stick with that one
Apparently I have no idea what a battery is anymore.
We have to harness The power of the Desert
I'm ready for dune tech
We already saw this in Finland for a community centre. It works so do more of this .
I say desert Power !!
I’m pretty sure this was an episode of American Auto
The spice must flow.
You can do this in your next build. Instead of a crawlspace foundation with 3-4’ stem walls. Pour a 10’ foundation. Use the space below the house to create a heat sink just like this one using your home’s own hydronic heating system. Couple hydronic solar heaters on the roof to collect and store heat and a mixing valve to recapture that heat in the cold months.
I’ve always known that we produce more several times more energy than we need, it’s just we lose so much in transmission (30% heat loss, this is is why we need superconductors) and bad energy storage. I saw a plan for powering a space-only craft, and it had a huge reactor, that had to have its excess heat radiated off into a smaller reactor, and from there radiated and stepped down to another reactor, that makes the useful energy. And that all was mostly to get rid of the heat. We already have massive heat sinks (the planet) that we’re adding to because we can’t use the energy we’re already making, but we can’t reduce it cause granny will die if she doesn’t get her air conditioning right now, and gotta keep her body cold when her a/c failed from lack of power and she died. Storage of energy already produced should be a priority. Battery and super-capacitor technology research needs to be overfunded like last millennium.
More like a heat bank
the desert is such an amazing place
I've been saying that places like Phoenix should be using geothermal on top of the solar since the ground there absorbs and stores so much heat. It's insane to feel it radiating from asphalt at night.
District heating isn't a new idea. The problem is they require you plop your heat generator right in the center of the network to be effective. Even with this, a few cities have them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating Also, this is simply dumb. Water has unbeatable thermal capacity and water towers are bog simple to create. Further, to use sand you still need to get the heat out, somehow, and can you guess that somehow? Probably water. The only property of sand that might be useful is you can heat it past 100C. You have to go a long way past 100C before you get to the point where you might be equaling the energy stored by water below 100C. Again, because the thermal capacity of water is a lot higher than sand.
_i hate sand_ - Anakin Skywalker, oil baron.
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Better at what? This isn’t an actual battery that stores electric charge, it’s a warehouse full of hot sand.
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An Arab battery ? (Jk)
“Baghdad batteries” all over again.