Finland is doing sand batteries big. Polar Night Energy already showed off an early commercialized version of a sand battery in Kankaanpää in 2022, but a new sand battery 10 times that size is about to fully rid the town of Pornainen, Finland of its need for oil-based energy.

In cooperation with the local Finnish district heating company Loviisan Lämpö, Polar Night Energy will develop a 1-megawatt sand battery capable of storing up to 100 megawatt hours of thermal energy.

“With the sand battery,” Mikko Paajanen, CEO of Loviisan Lämpö, said in a statement, “we can significantly reduce energy produced by combustion and completely eliminate the use of oil.”

Polar Night Energy introduced the first commercial sand battery in 2022, with local energy utility Vatajankoski. “Its main purpose is to work as a high-power and high-capacity reservoir for excess wind and solar energy,” Markku Ylönen, Polar Nigh Energy’s co-founder and CTO, said in a statement at the time. “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.” ...

Sand—a high-density, low-cost material that the construction industry discards [Note: 6/13/24: Turns out that's not true! See note at the bottom for more info.] —is a solid material that can heat to well above the boiling point of water and can store several times the amount of energy of a water tank. While sand doesn’t store electricity, it stores energy in the form of heat. To mine the heat, cool air blows through pipes, heating up as it passes through the unit. It can then be used to convert water into steam or heat water in an air-to-water heat exchanger. The heat can also be converted back to electricity, albeit with electricity losses, through the use of a turbine.

In Pornainen, Paajanen believes that—just by switching to a sand battery—the town can achieve a nearly 70 percent reduction in emissions from the district heating network and keep about 160 tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere annually. In addition to eliminating the usage of oil, they expect to decrease woodchip combustion by about 60 percent.

The sand battery will arrive ready for use, about 42 feet tall and 49 feet wide. The new project’s thermal storage medium is largely comprised of soapstone, a byproduct of Tulikivi’s production of heat-retaining fireplaces. It should take about 13 months to get the new project online, but once it’s up and running, the Pornainen battery will provide thermal energy storage capacity capable of meeting almost one month of summer heat demand and one week of winter heat demand without recharging.

“We want to enable the growth of renewable energy,” Paajanen said. “The sand battery is designed to participate in all Fingrid’s reserve and balancing power markets. It helps to keep the electricity grid balanced as the share of wind and solar energy in the grid increases.”"

-via Popular Mechanics, March 13, 2024

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Note: I've been keeping an eye on sand batteries for a while, and this is really exciting to see. We need alternatives to lithium batteries ASAP, due to the grave human rights abuses and environmental damage caused by lithium mining, and sand batteries look like a really good solution for grid-scale energy storage.

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Note 6/13/24: Unfortunately, turns out there are substantial issues with sand batteries as well, due to sand scarcity. More details from a lovely asker here, sources on sand scarcity being a thing at the links: x, x, x, x, x

They are specifically using sand from non-scarce sources that aren't suitable for construction.

The only thing sand in a sand battery needs to do is get hot and stay hot. Strictly speaking, you could use nearly anything from hot oil, to thermal salts, to a pile of rocks, to molten aluminum as the medium for a thermal battery (a sand battery is a kind of thermal battery). You could use basically any kind of rock ground into powder for a sand battery.

The company mentioned here wants to use mine waste in their batteries (though it's not clear if that's what they used in this battery).

Invisible Solar

Disguising solar panels as ancient Roman tiles in Pompeii

How They Work

Oh my goodness. 

Solar voltaic’s designed for historic contexts that offers architectural and aesthetic integration? 

AND they are already installed in Pompeii and not marketing vapourware?

AND they are made by a small Italian family business? 

Be still my beating solarpunk heart 🥰 ☀️

via @stml​ in a forum.

In France, all new and existing medium to large parking lots will have to be covered by solar panels

In France, solar just got a huge boost from new legislation approved through the Senate this week that requires all parking lots with spaces for at least 80 vehicles – both existing and new – be covered by solar panels.

Starting July 1, 2023, smaller carparks that have between 80 and 400 spaces will have five years to be in compliance with the new measures. Carparks with more than 400 spaces have a shorter timeline: They will need to comply with the new measures within three years of this date, and at least half of the surface area of the parking lot will need to be covered in solar panels.

Other measures on the table include building large solar farms on vacant land found alongside highways and railways, as well as on agricultural lands where feasible.

France’s national rail service SNCF also plans to install some 190,000 square meters of solar panels in 156 stations throughout the country by 2025 and 1.1 million square meters by 2030, all with the aim to reduce energy consumption by 25%.

The government also plans to build around 50 additional wind farms likes the one offshore Saint-Nazaire by 2050 in France. Measures are in place to reduce delays in building offshore wind farms from 10-12 years down to six years, and large solar farms from six years to three years.

(Source: Electrek, November 8th 2022)

   Years ago I was talking to friends about roofing over parking lots with solar panels. All I got at the time was some eye-rolling and some patient explanations about why that was not a reasonable idea.

  The last laugh, I am having. And all those cars will be comfortable when the owners get back in them, instead of boiling hot from sitting in the sun. Win/win!

It likely goes without saying, but of all the energy solar panels generated last year, none of it was produced at night. New research is showing that doesn’t have to be the case.

Researchers at Stanford modified commercially available solar panels to generate a small amount of electricity at night by exploiting a process known as radiative cooling, which relies on, no lie, the frigid vacuum of space.

When an object is facing the sky at night, it radiates heat out to outer space, which means that an object can become cooler than the air temperature around it. This effect could have obvious applications in cooling buildings, but the difference in temperature can also be used to generate electricity.

While the modified panels generate a tiny amount of energy compared with what a modern solar panel does during the day, that energy could still be useful, especially at night when energy demand is much lower, the researchers said.

Source: CNET (link in bio)

#solarenergy #technology #renewables https://www.instagram.com/p/Cd-4fWmrfNc/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

It likely goes without saying, but of all the energy solar panels generated last year, none of it was produced at night. New research is showing that doesn’t have to be the case.

Researchers at Stanford modified commercially available solar panels to generate a small amount of electricity at night by exploiting a process known as radiative cooling, which relies on, no lie, the frigid vacuum of space.

When an object is facing the sky at night, it radiates heat out to outer space, which means that an object can become cooler than the air temperature around it. This effect could have obvious applications in cooling buildings, but the difference in temperature can also be used to generate electricity.

While the modified panels generate a tiny amount of energy compared with what a modern solar panel does during the day, that energy could still be useful, especially at night when energy demand is much lower, the researchers said.

Source: CNET (link in bio)

#solarenergy #technology #renewables https://www.instagram.com/p/Cd-4fWmrfNc/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

“In recent years a futurist aesthetic movement has emerged in response to renewed public concern for the environment and a seeming lack of reflection of that concern in much contemporary art and design. Deriving its name from similar aesthetic movements such as Cyberpunk and Steampunk, its roots lay in various eco/climate science fiction and Post-Industrial futurist literature and is considered ‘punk’ in the sense that it is reactionary, and in opposition, to both the naive corporate utopianism that dominated the 20th century and the dystopianism that emerged in its wake by the end of that century, persisting to the present. We now live in an era where pragmatism is a radical stance. Thus Solarpunk seeks to cultivate a positive, hopeful, vision of a future rooted in technologies and culture of sustainability, yet in the context of what it acknowledges will be dramatic changes in our way of life due to Global Warming and the environmental malfeasance of the past, the transition to a renewables-based infrastructure, and the collapse of Industrial Age paradigms. A culture that has weathered the dramatic disruptions coming with the end of the Industrial Age, taken its sometimes bitter lessons from that, and found a way forward.”