What is Sand Battery Technology?
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| A sand battery stands tall (Source: AP/CC) |
The world is in dire need of energy. But while doing so, it gives preferential treatment to that energy which comes by without much burden to the climate. Renewable energy sources are worth mentioning here but, is man able to adequately tap the vast energy embedded in them? The wind doesn't blow all the time to keep the windmill on, and the sun doesn't shine every day of the year to keep solar panels excited, and even if they did, does man yet has the technology to harness or store all the energy released from these renewable sources? No! Without much argument, the use of technology to develop systems that can store renewable(green) energy for man's continuous use is one long journey that the world is headed on right now.
It is against the background difficulties associated with the foregoing task, that the sand battery technology takes an audacious outing - storage of green energy. And doing so while the climatic conditions are ideal. Take a look!
Most batteries in use globally are made from lithium-ion which is costly to extract. Lithium-ion batteries are used majorly in electronics and the transportation sector. They are good but have limited storage and are expensive to get vis-a-vis sand batteries.
But today two Finnish researchers have shown the world that sand can be the secret dark horse to the world's energy storage, as it can store heat energy for months. The developers say this could solve the problem of year-round supply, a major issue for green energy.
How Does it Work?
The novel sand battery technology, from farm to fork, is an entirely green energy generation and storage system. The set up compose of a windmill or solar panels, as the case might be, a heat exchanger, and a giant steel silo ( 4 by 7 m in size) filled with hundreds of tons of low-grade sand - the one used in building.
The sand is then heated with cheap solar or wind energy nearby via resistive heating, and stored at temperatures of between 500 to 600°C, after which the stored heat can be wired to a local energy provider to heat homes and the rest. in the winter when energy is always expensive.
If you've walked barefooted on hot beach sand before, then you should understand that sand stores heat well.😂
Once heated to 500C or 932 degrees Fahrenheit, the giant silo can stay hot for months without the need for energy from solar or wind generators. Both generators only offer intermittent power and not all the time.
Essentially, what this technology can help solve is that it can help enough heat in the summer for use later in the long, cold winter often experienced in polar countries like Finland, etc.
Who Are Those Behind the Technology?
It got started in Finland by a start-up called Polar Night Energy - founded in 2016 by two young university graduates of engineering namely Markku YIönen and Tommi Eronen, both interested in thermal energy.
The idea for the sand battery was first developed by the duo at a former pulp mill in the city of Tampere, with the council donating the workspace and providing a seed funding of some 500K to get it off the ground.
Their first sand battery is installed in the Vatajankoski power plant in Kankaanpaa, a town in Southwest Finland. This is the first commercial sandblasted energy storage facility currently in operation in the world.
How Effective is the Technology?
The technology holds much in prospect and is being understudied in many research centres around the world. Aside from being a solution to the energy storage challenge, this idea is also a viable one. A typical set-up as the one described briefly above, can discharge a maximum of 100KW of heat power and has a total energy capacity of 8MWh. This is reasonable to heat many homes in Finland, a country that experiences long cold winters. Remember, Finland recently got cut off the tap bringing LNG supplies from Russia over the latter's failure to open a Ruble trading account and intention to join NATO.
Also, it has been revealed that some researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in the US are in the late stages of prototype testing of a similar technology that uses sand, but these two Finnish guys have overtaken them in this regard. Overtaking is allowed in the global technology stage.
What Are The Concerns?
One of the big challenges now is whether the technology can be scaled up to make a difference - and will the developers be able to use it to get electricity out as well as heat? This is as the plant's efficiency observably, falls dramatically when the sand is used to just return power to the electricity grid.
Another is the worrying alarm raised by the UN report, which lists water and sand as being two of the Earth's most exploited resources. Don't you think mining hundreds of tons of low-grade sand as required here, would be a problem in the future when the technology eventually gain global adoption? How about posing a threat to real estate development? Well, maybe I'm just thinking out loud😎.
It may find wide applications in polar countries Finland, Sweden, Australia, New Zealand, etc. These countries often don't have a long period of sunlight, as is, in countries near the equator like Nigeria, and Senegal, to name a few.
What You Should Know
Do you know where many start-ups fail? It is mostly at the point of transforming an idea from the university environment to real-world commercial applications. If the two young guys at Polar Night didn't persist with their idea, Polar Night Energy won't be here in the first place. Talk less, of the 500K they eventually raised in seed funding to bring this project on board.
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