The World’s First Sand Battery Debuts in Finland
As fossil-fuel-derived energy systems facilitate the degradation of the planet, researchers have been innovating alternative and sustainable solutions—including the world’s first sand battery from Finnish startup Polar Night Energy. Currently operating in Finland’s Kankaanpää district, the battery relies on a large steel tank full of regular, dry sand with a heat exchanger buried in the middle. When the sand is heated, the tank can store eight megawatt-hours of energy at a nominal power output of 100 kW. Then, whenever it’s required, “the energy is extracted again as heat in the same way.” The whole process costs less than €10 per kilowatt-hour and can store energy for months. According to global initiative Mission Innovation, working all of Polar Night Energy’s sand batteries at full capacity could “reduce annual greenhouse emissions by somewhere between 57 and 283 megatons of CO2 equivalent per year by 2030.” Learn more about this at New Atlas.
Image courtesy of Depositphotos
Via newatlas.com link opens in a new window
