What I don't get is when people say that the round trip efficiency of Sand is low compared to Li Batteries. My take is WHO CARES?! If you lose 30%-50% of generated renewable power storing it in Sand that's STILL 50%-70% power you would otherwise have lost because you don't have storage. And if Sand is MUCH cheaper than Li batteries and not subject to the scalability issues of batteries then it's better than nothing.
I get your point and it does have merit. But by the same logic, the efficiency of the renewable power source wouldn't matter either. Looking at it in reverse, a lower round-trip efficiency means lost power that you wouldn't lose if you used a Li-ion battery, improving your energy independence.
@@ipp_tutor Yes, but With Sand batteries you don't have to Ramp up production on Li, Cobalt, Manganese, and every other substance we would need to electrify everything and keep pumping out Batteries. The cost of mining, transport, pollution, discard, recycle of any Chemical battery (even if we switch the Na instead of Li) will Always be more than building a Big insulated tank and filling it with sand.
@@jonjohns8145Why not just convert excess supply into hydrogen injected into existing natural gas system with a capped limit where safety wouldn't be an issue.
They have been called "heat stores" for decades. Some people in hot climates pump the hot air from their roof spaces during the day into a bed of rocks under their houses to use as heat during the night. Pumping air is very cheap, and rocks are excellent thermal stores. Others use 'trombe walls' to the same effect either storing energy in the wall, or a rock bed underneath. Trombe walls can also cool houses!
Most uses with the heat pump are indoor-outdoor, but if you create heat-cold storages, then it might be more effective when the indoor-outdoor temperatures are less extreme. Also, if you have solar panels on the roof, you might want to cool them by bleeding the heat off and directly into your storage system.
Im surprised, you made it to minute 14 in the video, and hours of research..... before the lightbulb moment.... Im canadian, that might explain it.... I have a wood burning sand battery in my shop.... Works great in the summer to keep the shop cool, as well.... Please dont describe the ion battery as a " mature " technology, since by your own admissions, sand batteries have been used since the 15th century.... I have a functioning hillbilly sandbox working right now.... And not the first clue how to even build a battery.... Which would you consider a more accessible and mature texhnology?... Lol Be well, thanks for the videos, keep teaching and sharing....
When people picture sand spread across idyllic beaches and endless deserts, they understandably think of it as an infinite resource. But as we discuss in a just-published perspective in the journal Science, over-exploitation of global supplies of sand is damaging the environment, endangering communities, causing shortages and promoting violent conflict. Sand is not the answer as it is used in so many everyday projects in economies around the world and numerous countries are already in short supply. The negative consequences of over-exploiting sand are felt in poorer regions where sand is mined. Extensive sand extraction physically alters rivers and coastal ecosystems, increases suspended sediments and causes erosion. I suppose the west could replace it with the garbage they produce to replace the sand; which of course would never be called exploitation of the poor and lead to world wide social unrest.
@@edgelord6560 There are two major sand Deserts. One is the Sahara located in the Middle East/Northern Africa and the other is the Gobi located in China. The first is one of the most politically unstable areas in the world and the second belongs to a country that has to support 25% of the worlds population. So you want the USA to depend on China even more let alone the area that already controls the majority of easily obtained oil.
@@edgelord6560 Sand is the most abundant solid substance on the planet, but we also use it more than anything else. The only two things that are consumed more than sand is air and water. We use about 50,000,000,000 tons of sand every year. That is a quantity large enough to cover the entire state of California. Cut out California on a map and then go ahead and try to copy and paste in on other parts of the world. This is the problem of big numbers. But essentially, it’s impossible for us to conceptualize things in the billions that we consume by the dozen.
@@anthonycarbone3826Doesn't America have deserts of its own? Seems to me that there are plenty of deserts in those cowboy movies you consistently sent around the world. Or are they are protected in national parks and can't be touched?
@@Debbie-henri Much of the desert land in the USA is controlled by the Federal Government in Parks and other Federal Land Management. You do understand taking all of the sand destroys the surface ecology for both humans and wild life. Do you really think the tree huggers are going to stand by and allow real destruction of animal habitat and National Parks. This is not something that is underground and out of the public's notice. Plus deserts are prone to flash floods and without the sand the floods will cause even more irrevocable erosion which sets off a chain reaction of even more dire consequences for everything living in the area.
14:00 pro tip. you don't have to just go up LOL you can also go down with it! 10 stories underground 3 stories above ground AND less wall support issues and collapse problems. so the acerage is way less than shown here by a huge amount! also you build a 50 storey building they go down like 20 stories in the basement to anchor it etc. well you can build your sand silo and bury it right next to the foundation and heat it from there forever. run electric in heat and hot water comes out
This also solves the spillage issue, and doesn't have the potential to poison local soils because the stuff is solid. Although, you have to wonder what benefits sand has over local earth given that you don't need to excavate anything to do traditional, residential geothermal storage.
I think DIYers will build sand batteries. You could probably build some rudimentry heating system using nothing but reclaimed bits and pieces and some tinkering
People do but it is harder than it looks. One can use a water-heater's thermal element (electric backup element) for heating it up, but getting the heat out of the sand battery is actually not entirely trivial. Basically you need something that can tolerate the heat and you need airflow to get the heat out again. An open-ended steel pipe with a fan on one end to push air through, and then some fins (like a piece of a radiator) to disperse the heat in the air because you don't want a blast of hot air at 500C. Regulating the output is the hard part. You can't just duct it to the house (not at 500C). One mistake and the whole house burns down.
On most videos you'll see on the subject, there's usually a lot of physical effort involved, and it doesn't really last past half a day. They work, but there's a human in the loop, and it's not a small part. An electrically-heated sand battery might require less effort, but there's usually not a reason to do that unless the electricity isn't coming from the grid, otherwise, you might as well turn on your normal electric heater. So far, I haven't seen anyone do anything beyond a proof of concept or proof that it works for the room they intend to heat. Also, almost none of them do any sort of heat regulation, but that's usually because they're trying to heat a large room as quickly as possible. I've never seen one try to do a hot water system.
We have water batteries here in Germany. It´s just a huge insulated water tanks placed underground with a coil in it and some plumbing. Solar energy during the summer is being stored all the way up to the winter. It´s overall efficiency is better than with Li-ion batteries and it´s cheaper. Doesn´t get as hot as with Sand but is cheap and works.
All these thermal mass batteries such like, sand batteries, gravel batteries, stone batteries, brick (masonry) batteries, water batteries and even ground heat batteries, all have a common liver line, they are very cheap and a handy man can do 80% of the functionality for the 20% of the cost (the Pareto principle) on their own, and not to speak about the long term maintenance savings.
You mentioned a "cold battery". Check out Ice Bear by Thule Energy Storage. This is daily thermal energy storage (DTES). Before refrigeration was invented people would harvest winter time ice from a lake and store it in an "ice house" so they would have ice in the summer time. This is seasonal thermal energy storage (STES). For winter home heat I use PV-direct to heat water in an uninsulated tank when the sun shines that at night heats the house (DTES). I am still trying do decide between sand or water or other for (STES). Thank you for a most informative video.
Cold batteries are already in use. There is one under Helsinki, a huge pool of cold water, and it's a part of a pretty extensive district cooling system. They have also district heating but the cooling system is also quite widespread and has been there for 20 years.
I've also seen an old ice house design from somewhere in the middle east, where they can't just store the ice. It used the expansion of air descending through a chimney into a larger chamber to make ice. My father used to work at a historic cliff dwelling in New Mexico where that mechanism occurred naturally, keeping the caves at about 65 F even when the temp outside was in the hundreds.
@@Nurk0m0rath For the cooling chimney, what's the process which does the cooling and is that cooler air just becoming the ambient air for their living area? It's not stored anywhere of course.
@@markhathaway9456 I'm no physicist but I understand the cooling effect is created by reverse compression. When the air is drawn into the chimney (or cracks in the cliff) and compressed, then hits a larger chamber, it slows and expands, becoming colder. I'm none too clear on the details of how it works though. I've been trying to remember where I saw that design and the closest I can think of is that it might have been in one of those features about ancient advanced technologies.
I am a big believer in thermal energy. This was true even before I knew anything. I had a house that utilized a wood burning enclosed burn chamber in our mud room that burned wood very efficiently and heated a ceramic tile wall in the house. There was a ceiling fan near by to aid in distribution of the heat and that wall would stay warm for days. Think if you had something similar that heated sand with excess solar electricity then circulated air through steel piping in the sand to heat the wall. I feel too many people discount ideas such as these with arguments about efficiency. Once installed there is virtually no maintenance. This can be built with off the shelf equipment that would make repairs such as a blower motor easy to do. This type of system could last the entire lifespan of the home and could be self powered by the same solar system. Upfront costs, yes, but after that, you could have supplemental heat for life. The cost for this is not too much compared to the propane cost reduction it could provide. If I could reduce my propane by 30%, that’s like $500 a year, every year, forever!
That's the biggest "gotchya" to this entire discussion...GSHP (ground-source heat pumps) are already better than the best sand batteries. The sun already heats the earth, such that the energy needed can be moved around (through heat pumps) to warm and cool your home, as needed. With that work done, heating water with a heat pump is also very easily done. My home has an air-source heat pump and hot water heater with a heat pump on top of it. My summer vacation place is going to use a ductless mini-split for all the same reasons. The sand battery is going to have limited application for metro areas with existing hot water radiator networks.
you would need a way to be pulling the heat out of the batteries at least on average at the rate the heat is being put in, since the data center heat output would be fairly steady and it doesnt need any of that heat back. buffering in sand batteries might let the heat be coupled to consumers better.
Data centers already recycle waste heat to some degree. The real problem though is that the "heat" you get out of a data center really isn't all that hot, and it is really really difficult to extract useful work out of something that isn't all that hot.
Passive buildings sometimes use thermal mass such as winter sun hitting walls or floors of which cement to heat up during the day and release that heat at night. This works at residental scale
That can be a medium for storing heat in a system with a heat pump. Whether something natural like stone would be best for a cold storage isn't known to me, but natural safe materials at temperatures which don't explode, even when water is applied, would be great.
A dual phase sand tank with separate cold and hot sides sounds kind of brilliant. You'd be able to do all kinds of amazing things with having both a chilled battery and a heat battery. Throw in some heat exchangers and suddenly your steel plants are powering your industrial freezers. The concrete plant down the street can cool the freezer of every local restaurant. If we think in terms of districts and communal sourcing rather than individualized solutions, economy of scale works in *everybody's* favor. It makes little sense for an individual house to power it's own hot water tanks when it would cost orders of magnitude less overall to do so for an entire city, plus there would never be any chance of running out of hot water.
I'm pretty sure you'd quickly run into huge losses if you try to run very hot or very cold water through long runs of pipe. A city-wide system would (I surmise) have far greater losses than using heat pumps for individual freezers and water heaters. Industrial freezers (and heat pumps generally) are already extremely efficient. With a good modern unit, you get about 3x more cooling than the amount of energy you put in. This is because heat pumps MOVE heat, rather than generating it.
It's good that you mentioned the Northern parts, like Canada or Northern Europe, that's where it can be most useful. I too do not see the use of it much outside the district heating of places in colder climates, because in the Northern places you mentioned we will not get much sun from mid October - start of March, so all we have left of renewables is wind... and we have the MOST need of energy in those winter months when we cannot survive without heating and it is a huge chunk of energy we use. Lithium batteries are not the best storage medium to take in sun in August or September and then store it for December-February when it will be most needed. And even solving winter heating here makes a lot of sense because it is a huge chunk of our energy needs. Probably best options to keep energy gained during summer to the winter month are either convert it to hydrogen or such solutions as the sand batteries for heat.
Off hand, additional installation cost and maintenance access would probably be the primary reasons not to put the tank under ground. Digging/excavating a big enough hole can be expensive. If placed underground, you also might have issues with sinking, groundwater infiltration, seismic instability, etc. If there is any issues with the tank, maintenance and repair of the tank would be a lot more expensive and time consuming. Having said all that ... placing it underground might have some advantages, such as the tank being more insulated by the surrounding ground and other advantages.
My only question is this: What kind of sand do the batteries take? For example, does it take rough/course sand that is used in construction and concrete or the fine and smooth sand from oceans and African deserts?" If it’s the latter, could that help reduce brine from our oceans when we desalinate our waters? . I figure this product of theirs would incredibly valuable if it contributes to solving this problem of Brine.
I saw the polar night thing when they first installed it, seemed genius, so i built a small scale one using an approx. 1 cub yard of sand and a small wood stove. it has worked 2 winters now, but i still haven't worked out all the issues yet. i need to move more heat from the wood stove to the sand instead of heating my shop to 80+ degrees. I burn a small fire for approx 5-7 hrs per day, and the heat radiates off the insulated sand box at night and does a good job keeping my 1200 sq ft shop toasty warm all winter. saves a truckload of firewood compared to just the woodstove i had. plan to connect solar panels to it soon!
Good quality sand is becoming scarce in any places due to its use in construction. The world has been on a construction boom the last few decades and sand is a key ingredient in concrete. This could eventually be a problem if sand batteries become popular.
Sand is up there with water as the most consumed commodity by mankind, good point. One of the drawbacks of dams for electricity is that it stops sand from mountain glacier grinding to get to the ocean, who would have thought way back! Sand battery sand would be reusable though..
Regarding you comment of heating with natural gas at the end of the video. I'd like to clarify for you and (moreso) others who may not realize that the US (i I'm assuming that's where you live. I do) obtained approximately 40% of it's electricity supply from natural gas in '22 and even more in '23 (43%) that's excluding the additional almost 20% from coal. Renewable sources only slightly outpaced that. (21%) I'm 100% with those trying to get us toward renewable energy sources. We've made great progress but we have to be cognizant of where we are right now and the trade offs of the future. It's good to know where we sit.
No reason for thermal coal, start there. Solar is cheaper now. "Natural "gas, which is methane gas was the bridge fuel of the 90s not today. If I had to choose nuclear would be our bridge fuel for electricity generation for now. Natural gas energy plants can be turned off and on for demand, thats one good thing about them. Keep adding local renewables which dont have to be transmitted so far.
Just imagine that you have a factory where every machine has a steam engine, but the heat is provided by portable and replaceable sand batteries that's charged at a central heating location. This enables each machine to operate independently for a few hours before their batteries needs to be replaced. The batteries themselves to back to the charging station until they get hot enough again. At the very least, this would make for some very whimsical steampunk setup. It doesn't even have to be that elaborate. It'd be awesome enough to just pull a hot cylinder full of sand from the fireplace, put it in some huge automaton and watch it come to life.
The byproduct of Bitcoin mining and any data center is resistive heating, and it should be used any time resistive heating is mentioned in renewable energy.
Another great video with fantastic informative points like the energy -> heat ration vs the heat -> energy ratio where I had no idea. This and many other reasons is why I love the channel 🎦🎦
for a home it is much better to use a huge tank of water right in the middle or your basement and maybe the first floor and constructing the stairway around it. of course you need some insulation around the water tank. due to the fact that an insulation is not perfect anyway some heat always leaks out. however, this "heat loss" is not lost at all, because the tank is in the middle of your house. that means that this thermal leakage is already heating your house a tiny bit. you can also implement two different tube coils inside at the top and bottom and extract and put in the heat very flexible because on the upper end it will always be warmer than at the bottom. this way you can heat the top end up with thermal solar panel to max. 40 degrees C because that is warm enough for your house heating system and then you switch over to put the additional heat at the bottom of the tank. for extraction you could do a similar thing. if the tank is very hot on the top, like 95°C, you take the heat out of the bottom or a mixture out of it to go with the right temperature in your heating. if the whole tank is getting colder, you could extract it only on the top of the tank. this installation lasts practically forever. and while having a basement is expensive, it is still very nice for a big hobby room, fitness room, party room, storage room, etc.
There’s absolutely a case for residential heating use, if oversize your solar panel system and capture the excess energy in the sand battery, throughout the year. That can be used to heat your home through the winter.
I live in the desert southwest of the US, and that would be a wonderful application for our region. PLENTY of sun here, even in the winter. Such a system wouldn't have to be huge (as Ricky stated home systems would need to be) as our heating requirements are modest through the winter months. Even so, we do *have* heating requirements, as well as the need for hot water (of course). I would love to have a system like that for our home.
This is already being done here in Germany with water heat storing tanks. Also good thinking on your part. It´s efficiency is fantastic because sun energy is abundant in the summer and it´s used in the winter.
Maximizing efficiency is great, but economics still rules. If a sand battery can be built, on a per watt basis, for some fraction of the cost of a Li-On battery, then it is going to have an advantage, even if it only has a 65% roundtrip efficiency. This sand battery technology also would seem to have a big advantage for longer duration electricity production than a Li-On battery, which could prove to be useful for overcoming longer lulls in renewable energy production.
65% rountrip efficiency is likely better than Hydrogen, which we should also be pursuing at scale. California already has a glut of renewable electricity during the day.
If the heat is coming from Photovoltaic panels those also have low efficiently. Would it be more economical to us evacuated solar tubes to heat sand, then use it for home heating and electricity?
@@ricza7345 Have you seen the latest hybrid solar PVT? The panels also run tubing for water serving two purposes. Cooling the panels(which dont like extreme heat) and heating water. Ive seen this idea used in Europe.
They are comparing apples to oranges here. The current project has no reelectrification step. You basically pay $60/kwh just for the heat storage capabilities, while the battery system returns electricity at $150/kwh. The system is too expensive for just heat, because you are paying more than just the renewable energy production, like grid fees and taxes. Even if the electricity price was zero because of taking overproduction, you would still pay 10 cents for getting it into the storage. You can turn 1 kwh of electricity into 4 kwh of heat with a heap pump. Here you convert 1 kwh of electricity to maybe 0,85 kwh of heat, after it was moved from the storage through the district heating and into your home.
I can’t remember the show but instead of sand they froze a like a 4’ square box of water at night when energy was cheap to help the a/c during the day. Pretty sure it was a library or public building and in California
@@ipp_tutorI'm an irresponsible stoner but my uneducated guess would be zero miles. > pulls battery out > pours 1000 lbs of scorching hot sand in car > FORGETS device to convert heat to some other form of energy Y'all need to go touch grass and go camping to learn the hard on how to properly think ahead.
Peltier devices would pair nicely with sand storage. Efficiency would be awful but no moving parts for maintenance. Heat one sand battery and cool another during surplus and then reverse for generation
Efficiency would be more than awful but I agree on the low maintenance. Efficiency is kinda the crux of the matter, though... if one is over-producing so much that one can still get something useful out of multiple stages of an extremely inefficient dump, its better to do something more direct with that overproduction than stuff it into a sand-battery.
I am building a passive house with radiant floor heating. I have to insulate under the slab-on-grade and this got me thinking. What if I dig a bit deeper, insulate, then put down a layer of sand with the Pex piping in the middle of the sand layer, followed by the concrete flooring above. Would the sand battery under the slab make the entire flooring more efficient? Should the PEX go in the sand or the slab? Has anyone done this? Someone must have, but I can't find any information about it. Please tell me your thoughts.
It could work, but get a “open-minded” mechanical engineer to do some heat loss heat gain computation, you’d need to ensure it doesn’t overheat ( which is a different problem, even in very cold climates) I did something like that but using earth tubes that were charged/ recharged and it worked fine 👍🏿
Great idea! Reminds me of Drake Landing Solar Community in Alberta, Canada, a neighborhood which stores so much energy in the summer that they can use it to heat all winter.
@@markhathaway9456 They store a heat in a large underground area all summer, and it stays warm enough to provide heat all winter. You can't easily insulate something this well for a single house, but you can for a neighborhood. (Heat escapes based on the size of the surface area but the total amount of heat/energy stored is based on the size of the volume.)
I first learnt about sand batteries in Bill Millisons 'Permaculture Designers Manual' printed in 1988. They called it an 'energy store' and it is used as low grade heat for heating houses, green houses, hot wateretc, which is what this type of heat is best for, and which incidentally is the energy most people need/ use.
@@stefanweilhartner4415 *if*, and at those temperatures you lose a lot of the efficiency because the greater a temperature difference between two things, the quicker the heat transfer occurs. If you want to have a line of 80 degree air coming out of the tank, it would take significantly faster to get to that temp running through 800 degree sand than 98 degree water.
@@stefanweilhartner4415 Water stores less heat, can corrode the tank or spring a leak. For homes using rooftop solar power to heat the existing hot water tanks works fine already, but we are talking about grid storage here.
@@Fenthule Do you mean to say that the heat transfer is FASTER when the temperature difference is higher ? Or that it's FASTER with certain materials like water ?
We have water batteries here in Germany in some residential buildings. Those are basically huge tanks filled with regular water which is heated during the summer by solar panels and the heat is then stored and used during the winter to heat the building. It´s pretty simple. However producing electricity from heat is a bad idea, the loses are to great. However the overall efficiency of thie mentioned idea is way higher since the energy is stored in between seasons. The idea is fantastic because it´s rather cheap and technologically easy.
Could be an interesting use for all the unused office space in major cities. I imagine weight would restrict the number of floors able to be used, but buildings could easily have lower floors converted to thermal storage to help reduce heating and cooling cost, while also reducing the required occupancy rate. Especially if the building was able to store more energy than it used and was able to sell excess to surrounding office buildings.
I'm sitting here watching this and thinking "why does a sand battery have to be in an elevated silo or tower, why not just dig a big hole in the ground and fill it with the sand and equipment, then cover it over and use it for a parking lot, or sports ground, or any of the other possible uses for such an area?"
They store the sand in a silo because the walls of the silo are insulated to help maintain the internal temperature. They can put it under ground but then it would need reinforcement. A concrete box to protect it from pressure of a building or park on top of it.
@@victorlee447 That's not a sensible argument. I wasn't suggesting that an underground container would not need reinforcement - that would be stupid. The walls of a silo also NEED to be reinforced. So really, it does make more sense to put it underground then.
One missing point in this video is that the Li Ion batteries are Day storage, Sand Batteries can be used as seasonal storage, as Sand keeps the heat very long and is able to keep the heat from summer and move it to winter. On a limit, but much more than any other electrical battery system today!
Pretty good video, thanks for the details on the subject of sand batteries. It's great that low quality and can be used for this instead of beach/ocean sand etc
One thing that is really hard to quantify is the cost to downstream users. The beauty of batteries is that users all already are set up to use power. If you want to bring a huge sand battery to share heat then every home or business needs to be set up tp directly use heat. Perhaps that happens in some areas of the world - but none that I know. Also, how much heat would be lost in distribution? How much would it cost to prepare infrastructure to move around that much heat without huge losses? So many more factors to consider! Thanks for the good video and view of something new!
Umm as mentioned in the video it can be used for district heating, so you have a plant that provides hot water in a given area, nothing needs to change in the infrastructure outside of the plant, sure if you're running your own heating that's not gonna help much but it doesn't mean there are no use cases where it doesn't fit in perfectly
Building codes. Most of Europe has district heating. Most of North America doesn't. If cities start planning to add this infrastructure, then you absolutely could see this in the future. Although most systems only change in response to scarcity or drastic disturbance.
Sand (and better yet salt) might make a good heat battery but water and or salt might make a better cold battery. Volumetric heat capacity for one cubic meter of Water 4.184 MJ/m³*K Sand 2.1 x MJ/m³*K Salt 9.04 x MJ/m³*K. Because water can't store heat above 100c without requiring significant pressure containment, while sand and salt can without much consideration for pressure changes. As to a cold battery for air conditioning, temperature is mostly limited by not wanting not freeze water condensation from air, so the temperature shouldn't go below 0c. Operating a heat pump over night will reduce the temperature drop and improve the heat pump's COP. But, both sodium chloride salt and water store more energy per cubic meter than sand.
OK, but working only in Sahara size. :) For me one house one winter V 4000 m3, T 40-80 C, plus thermal insulation !!! TOTALLY STUPID IDEA! 20m x 20m x 10m insulated sand battery block for only one house?! THE SAHARA AND GOBI TOGETHER IS NOT ENOUGH FOR EVERYBODY WHO NEED THIS. BUT WE ALSO HAVE SOIL EVERYWHERE INSTEAD OF SAND! THAT'S IT!
When it comes to heat energy storage, besides cost of the storage medium, volumetric heat capacity is an important consideration. For instance silicon dioxide has a 1.855 J/(cm³*K) But sodium chloride is 9.04 J/(cm³*K). This means sodium chloride can store more than 4.5× as many joules of energy for each degree of temperature rise in a cubic cm. Yet both cubes have the same surface area to lose heat over. In other words, for each joule a cubic cm of silicon dioxide stores, a cubic cm of sodium chloride rises in temperature by less than 1/4.5 that of the silicon dioxide. And how fast heat is lost given the same surface area and insulation is proportional to temperature. Bulk sodium chloride and sand have similar cost so per cubic meter, so its volumetric heat capacity should take on a more important role in consideration.
Cold climates need heating for their houses and have a problem with snow blocking their roads. SOLUTION-Build sand batteries under the roads near the houses.The leakage of heat will keep the roads clear of snow
@13:55 Whoa! Ummm... I think you completely misunderstood or forgot your thermal conversion (gain/loss) data chart. Also You simply can't just flip a switch and now you get instant opposite thermal conversion with thermal batteries. Go back and look at your density and conductivity table, also your puny house interior air being converted into mass thermal sand battery (essentially backwards conversion) is utterly nonexistent as the availability of home living environmental control temp will never compete with the thermal sand loss, much less make any positive gains. ... Essentially these sand batteries are nothing more than an above ground heat pump system, and once you think of these principles you'll understand that there are other viable and readily available media that are superior to sand ( but more expensive initially). .... You also pointed out the great loss of total thermal capacity due to the heat loss from the walls... Well, this is not the sands fault but piss poor containment design and lack of insulation barriers.... I think it would have been beneficial to point this out. ... What seems to make these very inefficient sand battery systems attractive is the scalability.. you simply out-scale (by physical mass) the cost of the more efficient but initially more costly media to overcome the low efficiency of the sand. If you have the space and don't mind having a massive monolith in your back yard or community, then this is probably fine, but I think it's dumb because the land could be used to build a superior thermal system using different media for a considerably smaller footprint. I grew up in Alaska where we had similar systems and a massive community steam heat system and have experimented with thermal conversion systems as a hobby.
Storing cold isn't going to be practical. 2 reasons: 1) Heat can be put into sand at 100% efficiency with cheap reliable heating elements. 2) You can store a ton of heat because there is no upper bound to temperature, even at absolute zero you could only get a small fraction of the energy storage.
A pretty good presentation this time. Though you threw people for a loop at the beginning tying sand batteries into renewable intermittency... which you can't really do outside of home heating. Sand doesn't really solve intermittency for electricity generation and city thermal distribution systems are really quite specialized whereas electricity is ubiquitous. Your round-trip efficiency numbers seemed a bit goosed in the wrong direction. Not sure why they are so off but LFP batteries have roughly a 95% round-trip efficiency at the cell level (0.2C charging and discharging) ,for any application, and of course it is greater than 100% when you shove it through a heat pump. Throw in the electronics (but use a high battery bank voltage) and the AC-storage-AC round-trip efficiency (non heat pump) is around 92%. That is basically an unbeatable number. Note that LFP battery costs are dropping like a rock and will almost certainly fall through $60/kWh this year (if CATL is to be believed). In bulk, actually, LFP cells are already south of $80/kWh right now so the lithium battery cost numbers you stated in the video ($150/kWh) are actually quite dated. The quickly dropping cost of LFP batteries actually poses a huge challenge to the many alternative storage technologies. -Matt
It’s very important that we define what kind of sand we’re talking about. As I understand it, and it might’ve been on this channel, but if not it probably was Asianometry, not all sand is the same. The sand that we use for silicon wafers is a very special kind of sand that we don’t have such a large supply of compared with the demand for new microchips. It turns out this is not the kind of sand that you would find in deserts. Assuming that the sand for these batteries is desert sand, then we’re probably OK. But if it is the same kind of sand that ends up often being the source for silicon for microchips, then there may be a problem with this.
I’m still a big supporter of gravity batteries. I’m not sure that the concrete block with crane system is the way to go. With gravity batteries, you don’t lose any energy while it’s being stored. And you can use just about any material as the weight for storage. Here’s my idea: there’s a technology called plasma gasification which can be used to waste into a substance in addition to Certain metals and a form of methane gas that can be kept within the gasification system. System like this can get rid of the need for landfills and most recycling systems. One of the concerns is what do you do with the glass block waste afterwards? Here’s an idea: use it for a gravity. Replace landfill land with this kind of system, then cover the landfill with solar and wind generation systems. As a waste is turned into glass blocks, form them into the correct shape for a crane based gravity power storage system. For those not familiar, the concept is you use the powered operator crane which lifts up the storing potential energy at a greater height. When you want to reclaim the energy, the crane grabs the blocks and lets them drop, then powers a generator. There is some power loss in this process, but it is better than not being able to generate it all. And while there would be an eventual saturation from the gasification plant, the ability to make more blocks when they are needed means that the only limitation does such a system would be the land, and the height of the crane.
A heat battery in a greenhouse or passive solar residence during the winter, and then cover the windows during the summer (or plant deciduous trees south of it) so that it becomes a cold battery during the summer. Hmm…. It wouldn’t need such extreme temperatures on a residential scale in the first place, so the efficiency might actually be a pro instead of a con in this case?
It’s cute and fun to have the kitty system Think there was never a TV show, and I think that the driver is Michael Knight, but if I were to use this, I would want it to be aware of the real world, and know who I am. Maybe in a future update the system can learn the names of different people, identify their voices,and be aware that writer is a TV show, and that the system is based on that idea. Otherwise, I think the fiction of it would get old eventually.
I'm usually quite a big fan of this channel. However, I find this video to be slightly underwhelming. You seem to miss two crucial points: 1. heat batteries aren't a direct competitor of lithium ion / lfp (enter battery technology of choice here). Conventional batteries are quite good in storing (solar) energy generated by day to power the house at night. Heat batteries are better at storing energy generated in summer to convert (low worth) summer energy into high worth winter energy. That is why they are mainly proposed in colder climates: not because they are that good in the cold, but because in the Northern countries the difference between solar power in summer and winter is way bigger than in countries closer to the equator. Where I live in the Netherlands is not even that far north, but the difference between solar generation in winter and summer tends to be a factor of 5. 2. A KWh of heat is not as valuable as a KWh of electricity. "Converting heat from a heat battery to electricity gives a round trip efficiency of only 50 - 60%" However, using that 55% efficiency to power a heat pump with COP 3.5 (still low, mine did 4.5 last winter) suddenly means you convert 1 KWh of summer electricity into 1.925 KWh of heat in winter.
The cold battery is an interesting thourght, but would if water below 0°C still holds heat capacity of 4.182J/kg/K, I think that might be the better choice. Needs fact check and calculations.....
years ago, i had success heating sand with hot air in pipes, then, running ammonia and later naphthalene(from Coleman lantern fuel) through submerged tubes and powering a small steam engine. i dont know why this tech wasn't followed. i had a professor from Princeton university check it out and never heard again about it. i moved away and on to other things. -politics. dude, its really all about who owns/controls the labs and therefore the grants. eliminate the grant process and you will see a tech boom like we had back in the MOTHER EARTH NEWS days.
I like your idea about using it to cool as well. It sounds like you are thinking of having more than one temperature bank. You could draw heat from one for your heating needs and sink heat to the other for your cooling needs. Keeping strategic temperature ranges in each would allow you to use passive heat transfer for most applications. At the lower temperature ranges you could also use hydronics for a passive transfer medium, and heat pump for active transfers. It would be interesting to see what the net difference between heat needs and heat waste is in our homes. If we had staged temperature batteries we could capture waste heats and use them to preheat the thermal medium in the higher temp stages so that they require less energy. Heat Needs: Dryers, Stoves, Ovens, Water Heaters, Home Heat - Air, Home Heat - Radiant Floors, Side Walk Snow Melting Coils, Roof Snow Melting Coils, Swimming Pools (maybe not in San Diego, but up hear in the North), Green Houses, Cold Lithium Batteries, etc. Heat Wastes: Fridges, Freezers, Chilled Water Dispensers, Air Conditioning, Freeze Dryers, Green Houses, Hot Lithium Batteries, etc. I'm thinking three to five stages, one really hot, and two at the opposite ends of the useful heat pump temperature spectrum. Perhaps two more, one at the freezing and boiling point of water, since it is probably the best passive medium. That would complicate the waste electrical power side of the equation a little bit more, but I wonder if it is worth it. I think of two exotic waste cases. The fictional Stillsuit worn on Arrakis (I loved that episode by the way), and the intricate thermal management of a real Tesla vehicle. Questions: 1. It sounded like you were saying that they use sand as insulation too, which makes me wonder if we use much better thermal insulation, how long do you think we can we store heat. Can we save passive summer heat and use it in the winter? What about the opposite, save the absence of heat from the winter to sink heat to in the summer? 2. What are your thoughts about using deserts and glaciers to moderate the climate on mega scales? For instance, what if we tugged a huge iceberg from one of the poles to the California coast and moved the ice inland to Death Valley. It could take several years to complete, but the resulting ice melt would be inland where it is desperately needed, while lowering temperatures and not raising the sea level. (I got this idea from the movie: Brewster's Millions) I'm waiting for you and Matt Ferrell to collaborate on an episode. You, him, and Grady Hillhouse produce my favorite channels.
Haven't Earthships been using this "earthworks as thermal buffering/battery" technique for decades already? Is the only innovation here the ability to not wrap your house design around the thermal battery, so developers can keep stamping out standard post-WWII cookie-cutter suburban boxes?
All refrigeration, which includes air conditioning, is using heat to make cold. Nearly all installations use electricity to create that heat but there are gas refrigerators that use heat directly. So, refrigeration and air conditioning should be included in what can be powered with this technology. This make a big, difference to the ROI as air conditioning is powered during hot weather where the days are longest and the sun shines brightest. For new builds the structure could be above a sand heat reservoir in the ground. In this way the efficiency could be further improved.
90% round trip efficiency, when the heat is used directly & only 65% efficiency when the heat is converted back to electrical power. I assume for both of these numbers that the heat was transformed from electrical power by using thermal resistance. What would be the efficiency numbers, if a heat-pump was used instead? Using electrical power to "make" heat with thermal resistance, is as you said, almost 100% efficient, but heat-pumps are even better since they don't "create" the heat they just move it around. So would using heat-pumps instead of resistance make this process competitive with lithium-ion batteries in terms of efficiency?
Indeed, ideas about thermal storage like this are non-starters for efficient electrical storage to most engineers. Your figures about reconversion of stored heat energy to electricity are way too optimistic. Even the best thermal cycles, such as in nuclear plants, achieve ~33% thermal to electrical yield. So, a 3000 MW plant is required to produced 1000 MW electrical. The trouble to do this is also large in terms of capital plant and maintenance. The lay public is being mislead in most jurisdictions on this very point. Your problem on large scale heat storage is now thermal distribution - a very clumsy problem when there is no district heating infrastructure available. Only the nordic countries have gotten serious on thermal due to this very issue. Otherwise, around 8:00 2-BIT makes an odd error- indicating that water cannot be heated above its critical temperature - what's with that? Nuclear plants will often employ (partial) supercritical heat to raise efficiency.
I really hope a private version is made, not just the commercial variety, we should have the option to get a sand battery, even if it's a community one.
Sand batteries would be great for domestic applications. They could be located under a driveway or garage and provide a hot & cold geothermal sump/source for heat pumps. Heat pump COP could be boosted significantly with this technology. It would be ideal for continental climates - hot days/cold nights. We have to get smarter with pumps and thermal distribution generally.
Stop adding music and sound effects. It's nothing more than a distraction. I'm really interested in the video, but I'm constantly distracted by these sounds. I gave up watching it. Please STOP IT!!
Good evening all. I like the cold storage concept and I wondering why one would spend money for a sand storage facility instead of going directly to Geo-thermal storage? One will still need battery storage to run the systems without grid assistance. How big would a sand storage system need to be to to keep 100 square meters of your home, home X in location Y, comfortable throughout the year? I am embarking on a massive home remodel in California, and heating without Gas is starting to look like an excellent idea. Thanks 🦊Riki2Tails
I find my self disagreeing with your summary... Heat to electric is a silly compairison... Winter/summer.... Depends on the heatloss over time. (Unsure of the possibilities) If you can stire up your summer excess, and then use it in the winter that would be the holygrale
Great topic. There have been many “batteries” like this. Simply a means of storing energy. The real killer app will be the super capacitor. The ability to store massive amounts of energy quickly could change everything. Imagine a super capacitor connected to a sand (heat) battery. Theoretically one could capture lightning instantly and then feed that into the sand battery. Then draw the energy out in a controlled fashion from the battery. It’s only a question of figuring out the materials and methods. Definitely not simple but it is physically possible
Sand batteries are a good idea, a simple and cheap method of storing heat in the warmer months for use in the winter months by making use of surplus green energy, this would be ideal for North America/Canada, Northern Europe including Russia, and northern Asia including China to see them through December, January and February. But given the amount of sand required, I would view it as impractical for an individual home, but if you are building a street of 30 houses, it could make sense to scarify one plot for a big sand battery (which could at least have the facia of being another house) and be capable of suppling heat to the other 29 houses. It would definitely make sense for large buildings, like schools, hospitals, office blocks,Apartment block and shopping centres, although it could be argued that in a city there would not be enough space for a large sand battery, but what if the ground floor of any large building was to become the sand battery, and human activity were to start on the first floor, in a similar way the ground and first floor of a multi-story car park could be filled with sand to provide heat to surrounding buildings, alternatively you could bury the sand battery underground, but if a maintenance issue required you to empty it of sand this would be complicated. There might even be a case for sand batteries to be situated next to the junctions of main roads, like crossroads, roundabouts, or sharp bends, anywhere were braking or cornering takes place, a sand battery could provide under road warming for 100 yards either side of a potential hazard point, just enough to prevent ice forming. there is a growing number of places using district hot water systems to provide heating, may be there is the opportunity to combine an underground hot water reservoir heated by surplus green energy as district heating, and supplement that with an above ground sand battery also heat by surplus green energy I am reasoning that a properly insulated sand battery should hold on to its heat much longer Than a water reservoir, and would therefore be used to top up the hot water reservoir right through to the end of winter, with out having to rely on a fossil fuel back up, by thinking on multiple levels, you could get double the heat storage on the same ground area.
it's not "Batteries" it's just Energy conversions. Real Batteries should act as passives storage's and minimum if not none energy conversions happens. The system won't works if the whole closed loop systems got shutdown/inactive and the heat dissipates over time, it's just as silly as putting the extra power generated by the windmill or solar cells into series of electric motors to turn a compressor to compress air to be stored inside a closed vessels where if needed the compressed air can be used to turn a centrifugal wind electric generators. I get it Western peoples got skin rash and acute allergic reactions with "Lithium" technologies since it was dominated and monopolized by communist China but making such an low efforts silly propaganda's as this "Sand Battery" is just shameless, I expecting more "scientific" and "Intelligence" than this snake oils try hard type of "Innovations". I was expecting the similar Graphene advanced tech for energy storage comes up from the West to counter the communist China manipulations on Lithium not this nonsense.
One thing to remember when comparing the cost per kwh of a battery vs heat storage is that the electricity from the battery can be used with a heat pump which can have 400 to 500 precent efficiency in converting electricity to heat but also can be used for cooling. But in really cold environments, the sand battery seems like 8t could be a good idea.
But the heat could come from concentrated solar which is 95% efficient at catching sun rays instead of 20-25% photovoltaic with also a lot less copper silver silicon etc
I see a few problems here:- How exactly are we gonna transfer energy in n out ? Suppose we are using a steam driven turbine to take heat out it won't be abt to take all the energy. Like we will only be abt to exhaust 1000° C energy to 100° C energy coz steam can't exist below 100°C or so. Will the hardware used to heat up the system be efficient enough to transfer all the heat to the sand ?
I keep hoping to see a solution that can do "seasonal" energy shifting, not just "daily". California has a surplus of solar power in Spring and Fall, but we have no practical way of saving this for Summer and Winter. Batteries are too expensive. Sand seems the same. Hydrogen generation is very capital intense for such relatively low annual usage. Ideas?
Is it 1100 Deg C or Deg F? At 3:15 your graphic conflicted with your statement. Which one is correct and please let's stop with dual units all together-- Pick one and stick with it- we can handle it.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, ideas and videos. Very interesting technology. Never heard of sand batteries before but makes sense. Over 30 years ago when I was in high school there was a fad building outdoor wood boilers from masonry with huge insulated sand heat storage banks around them. Recently saw a video and they were saying there are two types of sand in the world, not all sand is good for construction, sand that has been worn smooth as in a desert is not good for construction and in some parts of the world good sand is at a premium. Imagine that if this technology were to takeoff hugely sand might become the next lithium in commodities. 😂. With heat pumps becoming all the rage with the improvements in operating in cold conditions to heat. I’m wondering if anyone is developing high temperature output heat pumps for sand batteries, you can multiply your efficiency by using the electricity to move heat rather than just making it. I’d they were to use sand batteries for electricity production they really need to look into sterling technology. I know from previous reading when the internet first came out that sterling single piston cryocoolers can also work in reverse to generate electricity. At the time the limiting factor was the extremely small demand for them has driven the price up to a premium level. I often thought that the electric car might bring them to a cost affective level since they would need compact coolers for automotive air conditioning. Unfortunately making miniature compressors happened instead. As far as your cooling idea I remember reading in a power trade magazine a few dozen years back of a ice cream company that was using off peak power to freeze an Olympic sized pool of water for cooling their plant. Wishing you and your family the best. Looking forward to seeing whatever creative videos you come up with next. If your looking to explore sand batteries yourself perhaps take a page out of the SpaceX text book and build yourself a used grain silo inside a slightly bigger silo and then fill the space between the two with perlite like SpaceX did with their sight built fuel tanks. I’ve heard on several farming channels that used grain bins are a thing and since the farmers are going to be hit hard financially in the upcoming year you might be able to get a sweet deal.
Why couldn't it be used in summer for air conditioning? Certain refrigerators are powered by propane heat to cool, so why not sand batteries to power air conditioners?
Imagine if the sand bank was buried and you build a greenhouse on top All leaks make for a tropical greenhouse in like canada as you can draw extra if needed but losses are just warm soil used for agriculture
The problem with using the heat directly is that the most sand exists where we don't need the heat! Turns out, Phoenix and Las Vegas aren't clamoring for heat for most of the year. Yes, we still need hot water, but maybe electricity is still the best use. That said, the "negative heat' aspect is interesting. But I don't think it's grid-capable.
I know you said you're experimenting with a new setup. I just wanted to give my feedback that your audio still has a long way to go. If you take the one stroke video for example the clarity on that video is very noticeably better than more recent vids. Hope you can get it sorted 😊 I can deal with poor graphics or anything else really, but audio is number 1 for me. I stopped watching one of your videos after a few minutes, which is the first time ever.
The "cold battery" has precedent. Do a search on "ice bear" systems which basically take "cheap" electricity at night (assuming time of use billing) and lower ambient temperature to create cost-effective ice, and then during the day the air conditioner is plumbed to run the through the ice as part of the condenser that greatly reduces the load on the main compressor. While sand could be effective here, the phase change of water stores a lot more thermal energy (or lack of thermal energy in the case of cold storage) per KJ and per volume than sand, so I'm not sure the economics would be competitive for a sand-based model by comparison since you can't go as far below ambient with cooling as you can go above ambient with heating (absolute zero is much closer to ambient than the 1100F is above ambient) that negates the main advantage that sand has in a heating scenario when trying to use it in a cooling one. That said, you should totally do a story around thermal storage for cooling as that is much more applicable to much of your U.S. audience.
If you want to store cold, liquid nitrogen would probably be better because of the phase change (14:40). You're also have an absolute limited of 300 degrees of temperature difference because it's impossible to store below absolute zero.
You state that this wouldn't work very well during the summer (other than your "cool battery" you mention later on). However, this would work great in the summer as well for "passive" cooling. Using a large radiator of sorts above the home, create an updraft through the home cooling from conduit that's in the ground. Even if not using it to "directly" cool the home, use this cooler air as the ambient "outside" air for an airconditioner to transfer heat into out of the home, making the aircon far more efficient. The pumping would almost be not needed for this type of loop as convection would keep hot liquid at the top of the draft tower/vent.
Hello. I w recently learned a lot about the TESLA baseless turbine. I honestly think it is viable, needs 2024 engineering. Some great content online about it and I can see you making a great video about the possibilities.
What I don't get is when people say that the round trip efficiency of Sand is low compared to Li Batteries. My take is WHO CARES?! If you lose 30%-50% of generated renewable power storing it in Sand that's STILL 50%-70% power you would otherwise have lost because you don't have storage. And if Sand is MUCH cheaper than Li batteries and not subject to the scalability issues of batteries then it's better than nothing.
I get your point and it does have merit. But by the same logic, the efficiency of the renewable power source wouldn't matter either. Looking at it in reverse, a lower round-trip efficiency means lost power that you wouldn't lose if you used a Li-ion battery, improving your energy independence.
@@ipp_tutor Yes, but With Sand batteries you don't have to Ramp up production on Li, Cobalt, Manganese, and every other substance we would need to electrify everything and keep pumping out Batteries. The cost of mining, transport, pollution, discard, recycle of any Chemical battery (even if we switch the Na instead of Li) will Always be more than building a Big insulated tank and filling it with sand.
Better than nothing is often the wrong way to go. Also t here are far superior media than sand, and quite inexpensive as well.
@@jonjohns8145Why not just convert excess supply into hydrogen injected into existing natural gas system with a capped limit where safety wouldn't be an issue.
Exactly
Let's call them "thermal batteries", so people won't think they compete with electrical batteries.
They have been called "heat stores" for decades. Some people in hot climates pump the hot air from their roof spaces during the day into a bed of rocks under their houses to use as heat during the night.
Pumping air is very cheap, and rocks are excellent thermal stores.
Others use 'trombe walls' to the same effect either storing energy in the wall, or a rock bed underneath.
Trombe walls can also cool houses!
Battery? Do these stores electricity?🤔🤨
using geothermal to heat and cool your house you basically are using the ground as a cold battery in the summer
Most uses with the heat pump are indoor-outdoor, but if you create heat-cold storages, then it might be more effective when the indoor-outdoor temperatures are less extreme. Also, if you have solar panels on the roof, you might want to cool them by bleeding the heat off and directly into your storage system.
If we could develop a bull shit batteries we could make them super cheaply in Washington DC.
Yes, I've known a few people who've gotten great mileage from their bullshit! 👍
Im surprised, you made it to minute 14 in the video, and hours of research.....
before the lightbulb moment....
Im canadian, that might explain it....
I have a wood burning sand battery in my shop....
Works great in the summer to keep the shop cool, as well....
Please dont describe the ion battery as a " mature " technology, since by your own admissions, sand batteries have been used since the 15th century....
I have a functioning hillbilly sandbox working right now....
And not the first clue how to even build a battery....
Which would you consider a more accessible and mature texhnology?...
Lol
Be well, thanks for the videos,
keep teaching and sharing....
First to first in the comments
When people picture sand spread across idyllic beaches and endless deserts, they understandably think of it as an infinite resource. But as we discuss in a just-published perspective in the journal Science, over-exploitation of global supplies of sand is damaging the environment, endangering communities, causing shortages and promoting violent conflict. Sand is not the answer as it is used in so many everyday projects in economies around the world and numerous countries are already in short supply. The negative consequences of over-exploiting sand are felt in poorer regions where sand is mined. Extensive sand extraction physically alters rivers and coastal ecosystems, increases suspended sediments and causes erosion. I suppose the west could replace it with the garbage they produce to replace the sand; which of course would never be called exploitation of the poor and lead to world wide social unrest.
We can use only river sand for construction. That's why there's a shortage but desert sand is almost unlimited
@@edgelord6560 There are two major sand Deserts. One is the Sahara located in the Middle East/Northern Africa and the other is the Gobi located in China. The first is one of the most politically unstable areas in the world and the second belongs to a country that has to support 25% of the worlds population. So you want the USA to depend on China even more let alone the area that already controls the majority of easily obtained oil.
@@edgelord6560 Sand is the most abundant solid substance on the planet, but we also use it more than anything else. The only two things that are consumed more than sand is air and water.
We use about 50,000,000,000 tons of sand every year. That is a quantity large enough to cover the entire state of California. Cut out California on a map and then go ahead and try to copy and paste in on other parts of the world. This is the problem of big numbers. But essentially, it’s impossible for us to conceptualize things in the billions that we consume by the dozen.
@@anthonycarbone3826Doesn't America have deserts of its own? Seems to me that there are plenty of deserts in those cowboy movies you consistently sent around the world. Or are they are protected in national parks and can't be touched?
@@Debbie-henri Much of the desert land in the USA is controlled by the Federal Government in Parks and other Federal Land Management. You do understand taking all of the sand destroys the surface ecology for both humans and wild life. Do you really think the tree huggers are going to stand by and allow real destruction of animal habitat and National Parks. This is not something that is underground and out of the public's notice. Plus deserts are prone to flash floods and without the sand the floods will cause even more irrevocable erosion which sets off a chain reaction of even more dire consequences for everything living in the area.
14:00 pro tip. you don't have to just go up LOL you can also go down with it! 10 stories underground 3 stories above ground AND less wall support issues and collapse problems. so the acerage is way less than shown here by a huge amount! also you build a 50 storey building they go down like 20 stories in the basement to anchor it etc. well you can build your sand silo and bury it right next to the foundation and heat it from there forever. run electric in heat and hot water comes out
This also solves the spillage issue, and doesn't have the potential to poison local soils because the stuff is solid.
Although, you have to wonder what benefits sand has over local earth given that you don't need to excavate anything to do traditional, residential geothermal storage.
Water ingress is a huge issue for below-ground-level structures, so it really isn't as straight-forward as one might think.
Going up is cheaper than going down.
Meanwhile in Australia, they tell us glass will be more expensive because the world is running out of sand.
It is conceivable that the stored heat from a sand battery could be used to generate electicity by means of a stirling engine.
I think DIYers will build sand batteries. You could probably build some rudimentry heating system using nothing but reclaimed bits and pieces and some tinkering
People do but it is harder than it looks. One can use a water-heater's thermal element (electric backup element) for heating it up, but getting the heat out of the sand battery is actually not entirely trivial. Basically you need something that can tolerate the heat and you need airflow to get the heat out again. An open-ended steel pipe with a fan on one end to push air through, and then some fins (like a piece of a radiator) to disperse the heat in the air because you don't want a blast of hot air at 500C.
Regulating the output is the hard part. You can't just duct it to the house (not at 500C). One mistake and the whole house burns down.
On most videos you'll see on the subject, there's usually a lot of physical effort involved, and it doesn't really last past half a day. They work, but there's a human in the loop, and it's not a small part. An electrically-heated sand battery might require less effort, but there's usually not a reason to do that unless the electricity isn't coming from the grid, otherwise, you might as well turn on your normal electric heater. So far, I haven't seen anyone do anything beyond a proof of concept or proof that it works for the room they intend to heat.
Also, almost none of them do any sort of heat regulation, but that's usually because they're trying to heat a large room as quickly as possible. I've never seen one try to do a hot water system.
We have water batteries here in Germany. It´s just a huge insulated water tanks placed underground with a coil in it and some plumbing. Solar energy during the summer is being stored all the way up to the winter. It´s overall efficiency is better than with Li-ion batteries and it´s cheaper. Doesn´t get as hot as with Sand but is cheap and works.
"I don't like sand. It's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere."
the worst is the weight! but at least you don;t have expansion, boiling, or leak problems like water, and it works more steady.
it's over, I have the high ground!
Not like you. You're everything soft and smooth.
@traybern Kramer, a Jedi? I doubt it.
All these thermal mass batteries such like, sand batteries, gravel batteries, stone batteries, brick (masonry) batteries, water batteries and even ground heat batteries, all have a common liver line, they are very cheap and a handy man can do 80% of the functionality for the 20% of the cost (the Pareto principle) on their own, and not to speak about the long term maintenance savings.
That heat could be used for saunas even in the summer, or heating swimming pools.
You mentioned a "cold battery". Check out Ice Bear by Thule Energy Storage. This is daily thermal energy storage (DTES).
Before refrigeration was invented people would harvest winter time ice from a lake and store it in an "ice house" so they would have ice in the summer time. This is seasonal thermal energy storage (STES).
For winter home heat I use PV-direct to heat water in an uninsulated tank when the sun shines that at night heats the house (DTES).
I am still trying do decide between sand or water or other for (STES).
Thank you for a most informative video.
Cold batteries are already in use. There is one under Helsinki, a huge pool of cold water, and it's a part of a pretty extensive district cooling system. They have also district heating but the cooling system is also quite widespread and has been there for 20 years.
I've also seen an old ice house design from somewhere in the middle east, where they can't just store the ice. It used the expansion of air descending through a chimney into a larger chamber to make ice. My father used to work at a historic cliff dwelling in New Mexico where that mechanism occurred naturally, keeping the caves at about 65 F even when the temp outside was in the hundreds.
Actually yoy can get cold from heat since fridge works on heating and gasifing things.
@@Nurk0m0rath For the cooling chimney, what's the process which does the cooling and is that cooler air just becoming the ambient air for their living area? It's not stored anywhere of course.
@@markhathaway9456 I'm no physicist but I understand the cooling effect is created by reverse compression. When the air is drawn into the chimney (or cracks in the cliff) and compressed, then hits a larger chamber, it slows and expands, becoming colder. I'm none too clear on the details of how it works though. I've been trying to remember where I saw that design and the closest I can think of is that it might have been in one of those features about ancient advanced technologies.
I am a big believer in thermal energy. This was true even before I knew anything. I had a house that utilized a wood burning enclosed burn chamber in our mud room that burned wood very efficiently and heated a ceramic tile wall in the house. There was a ceiling fan near by to aid in distribution of the heat and that wall would stay warm for days. Think if you had something similar that heated sand with excess solar electricity then circulated air through steel piping in the sand to heat the wall. I feel too many people discount ideas such as these with arguments about efficiency. Once installed there is virtually no maintenance. This can be built with off the shelf equipment that would make repairs such as a blower motor easy to do. This type of system could last the entire lifespan of the home and could be self powered by the same solar system. Upfront costs, yes, but after that, you could have supplemental heat for life. The cost for this is not too much compared to the propane cost reduction it could provide. If I could reduce my propane by 30%, that’s like $500 a year, every year, forever!
3:23 insert heat pump comment here
Totally
That's the biggest "gotchya" to this entire discussion...GSHP (ground-source heat pumps) are already better than the best sand batteries. The sun already heats the earth, such that the energy needed can be moved around (through heat pumps) to warm and cool your home, as needed. With that work done, heating water with a heat pump is also very easily done. My home has an air-source heat pump and hot water heater with a heat pump on top of it. My summer vacation place is going to use a ductless mini-split for all the same reasons. The sand battery is going to have limited application for metro areas with existing hot water radiator networks.
I've never been inside a hot Pyramid, so yeah sand is fantastic at cooling as well
It could be use to store excess heat from data centers to improve the efficency.
I think data centers could give the heat to a local central heating system?
you would need a way to be pulling the heat out of the batteries at least on average at the rate the heat is being put in, since the data center heat output would be fairly steady and it doesnt need any of that heat back. buffering in sand batteries might let the heat be coupled to consumers better.
Data centers already recycle waste heat to some degree. The real problem though is that the "heat" you get out of a data center really isn't all that hot, and it is really really difficult to extract useful work out of something that isn't all that hot.
Passive buildings sometimes use thermal mass such as winter sun hitting walls or floors of which cement to heat up during the day and release that heat at night. This works at residental scale
That can be a medium for storing heat in a system with a heat pump. Whether something natural like stone would be best for a cold storage isn't known to me, but natural safe materials at temperatures which don't explode, even when water is applied, would be great.
Hmm a cold battery... nice!
A dual phase sand tank with separate cold and hot sides sounds kind of brilliant. You'd be able to do all kinds of amazing things with having both a chilled battery and a heat battery. Throw in some heat exchangers and suddenly your steel plants are powering your industrial freezers. The concrete plant down the street can cool the freezer of every local restaurant. If we think in terms of districts and communal sourcing rather than individualized solutions, economy of scale works in *everybody's* favor. It makes little sense for an individual house to power it's own hot water tanks when it would cost orders of magnitude less overall to do so for an entire city, plus there would never be any chance of running out of hot water.
I'm pretty sure you'd quickly run into huge losses if you try to run very hot or very cold water through long runs of pipe. A city-wide system would (I surmise) have far greater losses than using heat pumps for individual freezers and water heaters. Industrial freezers (and heat pumps generally) are already extremely efficient. With a good modern unit, you get about 3x more cooling than the amount of energy you put in. This is because heat pumps MOVE heat, rather than generating it.
There's companyies like Potters Industries that could help make it cheaper by using Glass Sand.
It's good that you mentioned the Northern parts, like Canada or Northern Europe, that's where it can be most useful. I too do not see the use of it much outside the district heating of places in colder climates, because in the Northern places you mentioned we will not get much sun from mid October - start of March, so all we have left of renewables is wind... and we have the MOST need of energy in those winter months when we cannot survive without heating and it is a huge chunk of energy we use. Lithium batteries are not the best storage medium to take in sun in August or September and then store it for December-February when it will be most needed. And even solving winter heating here makes a lot of sense because it is a huge chunk of our energy needs. Probably best options to keep energy gained during summer to the winter month are either convert it to hydrogen or such solutions as the sand batteries for heat.
Why would it take up any Acers? Couldn't you put the tank under ground?
Off hand, additional installation cost and maintenance access would probably be the primary reasons not to put the tank under ground. Digging/excavating a big enough hole can be expensive. If placed underground, you also might have issues with sinking, groundwater infiltration, seismic instability, etc. If there is any issues with the tank, maintenance and repair of the tank would be a lot more expensive and time consuming. Having said all that ... placing it underground might have some advantages, such as the tank being more insulated by the surrounding ground and other advantages.
Or just use the sand that’s already there
Hey Ricky you can use this technology to heat your pool
My only question is this:
What kind of sand do the batteries take? For example, does it take rough/course sand that is used in construction and concrete or the fine and smooth sand from oceans and African deserts?"
If it’s the latter, could that help reduce brine from our oceans when we desalinate our waters? . I figure this product of theirs would incredibly valuable if it contributes to solving this problem of Brine.
I saw the polar night thing when they first installed it, seemed genius, so i built a small scale one using an approx. 1 cub yard of sand and a small wood stove. it has worked 2 winters now, but i still haven't worked out all the issues yet. i need to move more heat from the wood stove to the sand instead of heating my shop to 80+ degrees. I burn a small fire for approx 5-7 hrs per day, and the heat radiates off the insulated sand box at night and does a good job keeping my 1200 sq ft shop toasty warm all winter. saves a truckload of firewood compared to just the woodstove i had. plan to connect solar panels to it soon!
Check out videos on using a Rocket stove to make and direct the heat you want to store.
Good quality sand is becoming scarce in any places due to its use in construction. The world has been on a construction boom the last few decades and sand is a key ingredient in concrete. This could eventually be a problem if sand batteries become popular.
Yeah I'm hoping that the _cheap_ sand will work just as well for this - but he didn't mention.
Sand is up there with water as the most consumed commodity by mankind, good point. One of the drawbacks of dams for electricity is that it stops sand from mountain glacier grinding to get to the ocean, who would have thought way back! Sand battery sand would be reusable though..
Parrot fish are always happy to make more 😊
I stopped consuming any media concerning the development of battery technologies a decade ago. I'm glad I did. None of them went anywhere
Regarding you comment of heating with natural gas at the end of the video.
I'd like to clarify for you and (moreso) others who may not realize that the US (i I'm assuming that's where you live. I do) obtained approximately 40% of it's electricity supply from natural gas in '22 and even more in '23 (43%) that's excluding the additional almost 20% from coal.
Renewable sources only slightly outpaced that. (21%)
I'm 100% with those trying to get us toward renewable energy sources. We've made great progress but we have to be cognizant of where we are right now and the trade offs of the future.
It's good to know where we sit.
No reason for thermal coal, start there. Solar is cheaper now. "Natural "gas, which is methane gas was the bridge fuel of the 90s not today. If I had to choose nuclear would be our bridge fuel for electricity generation for now. Natural gas energy plants can be turned off and on for demand, thats one good thing about them. Keep adding local renewables which dont have to be transmitted so far.
Just imagine that you have a factory where every machine has a steam engine, but the heat is provided by portable and replaceable sand batteries that's charged at a central heating location. This enables each machine to operate independently for a few hours before their batteries needs to be replaced. The batteries themselves to back to the charging station until they get hot enough again. At the very least, this would make for some very whimsical steampunk setup. It doesn't even have to be that elaborate. It'd be awesome enough to just pull a hot cylinder full of sand from the fireplace, put it in some huge automaton and watch it come to life.
The byproduct of Bitcoin mining and any data center is resistive heating, and it should be used any time resistive heating is mentioned in renewable energy.
The density of that heat is quite low though. That limits it's usefulness.
The circular energy economy!
@@NoHandleToSpeakOfLiquid cooling of mining is becoming more common as the 30 to 50 sound db level drop is life-changing for the better.
@@RP-hn1qc Sure, but how do you cool the liquid?
Another great video with fantastic informative points like the energy -> heat ration vs the heat -> energy ratio where I had no idea. This and many other reasons is why I love the channel 🎦🎦
Agreed!
for a home it is much better to use a huge tank of water right in the middle or your basement and maybe the first floor and constructing the stairway around it.
of course you need some insulation around the water tank. due to the fact that an insulation is not perfect anyway some heat always leaks out.
however, this "heat loss" is not lost at all, because the tank is in the middle of your house. that means that this thermal leakage is already heating your house a tiny bit. you can also implement two different tube coils inside at the top and bottom and extract and put in the heat very flexible because on the upper end it will always be warmer than at the bottom. this way you can heat the top end up with thermal solar panel to max. 40 degrees C because that is warm enough for your house heating system and then you switch over to put the additional heat at the bottom of the tank. for extraction you could do a similar thing. if the tank is very hot on the top, like 95°C, you take the heat out of the bottom or a mixture out of it to go with the right temperature in your heating. if the whole tank is getting colder, you could extract it only on the top of the tank.
this installation lasts practically forever. and while having a basement is expensive, it is still very nice for a big hobby room, fitness room, party room, storage room, etc.
There’s absolutely a case for residential heating use, if oversize your solar panel system and capture the excess energy in the sand battery, throughout the year. That can be used to heat your home through the winter.
I live in the desert southwest of the US, and that would be a wonderful application for our region. PLENTY of sun here, even in the winter. Such a system wouldn't have to be huge (as Ricky stated home systems would need to be) as our heating requirements are modest through the winter months. Even so, we do *have* heating requirements, as well as the need for hot water (of course). I would love to have a system like that for our home.
This is already being done here in Germany with water heat storing tanks. Also good thinking on your part. It´s efficiency is fantastic because sun energy is abundant in the summer and it´s used in the winter.
Maximizing efficiency is great, but economics still rules. If a sand battery can be built, on a per watt basis, for some fraction of the cost of a Li-On battery, then it is going to have an advantage, even if it only has a 65% roundtrip efficiency. This sand battery technology also would seem to have a big advantage for longer duration electricity production than a Li-On battery, which could prove to be useful for overcoming longer lulls in renewable energy production.
65% rountrip efficiency is likely better than Hydrogen, which we should also be pursuing at scale. California already has a glut of renewable electricity during the day.
If the heat is coming from Photovoltaic panels those also have low efficiently. Would it be more economical to us evacuated solar tubes to heat sand, then use it for home heating and electricity?
@@ricza7345 Have you seen the latest hybrid solar PVT? The panels also run tubing for water serving two purposes. Cooling the panels(which dont like extreme heat) and heating water. Ive seen this idea used in Europe.
They are comparing apples to oranges here. The current project has no reelectrification step. You basically pay $60/kwh just for the heat storage capabilities, while the battery system returns electricity at $150/kwh. The system is too expensive for just heat, because you are paying more than just the renewable energy production, like grid fees and taxes. Even if the electricity price was zero because of taking overproduction, you would still pay 10 cents for getting it into the storage. You can turn 1 kwh of electricity into 4 kwh of heat with a heap pump. Here you convert 1 kwh of electricity to maybe 0,85 kwh of heat, after it was moved from the storage through the district heating and into your home.
I can’t remember the show but instead of sand they froze a like a 4’ square box of water at night when energy was cheap to help the a/c during the day. Pretty sure it was a library or public building and in California
There was one in Texas too, I think
Sand battery powered Tesla... coming soooon! Oh yeah 😎
LOL That would be a site to see!
I wonder how long a Tesla would go if you swapped the battery pack for an equal mass of hot sand. Interesting question
@@ipp_tutorI'm an irresponsible stoner but my uneducated guess would be zero miles.
> pulls battery out
> pours 1000 lbs of scorching hot sand in car
> FORGETS device to convert heat to some other form of energy
Y'all need to go touch grass and go camping to learn the hard on how to properly think ahead.
Peltier devices would pair nicely with sand storage. Efficiency would be awful but no moving parts for maintenance. Heat one sand battery and cool another during surplus and then reverse for generation
Efficiency would be more than awful but I agree on the low maintenance. Efficiency is kinda the crux of the matter, though... if one is over-producing so much that one can still get something useful out of multiple stages of an extremely inefficient dump, its better to do something more direct with that overproduction than stuff it into a sand-battery.
I am building a passive house with radiant floor heating. I have to insulate under the slab-on-grade and this got me thinking. What if I dig a bit deeper, insulate, then put down a layer of sand with the Pex piping in the middle of the sand layer, followed by the concrete flooring above. Would the sand battery under the slab make the entire flooring more efficient? Should the PEX go in the sand or the slab? Has anyone done this? Someone must have, but I can't find any information about it. Please tell me your thoughts.
It could work, but get a “open-minded” mechanical engineer to do some heat loss heat gain computation, you’d need to ensure it doesn’t overheat ( which is a different problem, even in very cold climates)
I did something like that but using earth tubes that were charged/ recharged and it worked fine 👍🏿
Thank you, Kori. I'll see how open-minded of a mechanical engineer I can find :) @@koriifaloju2051
Correction...( 3:16)
1100 degrees Fahrenheit....
660 Celsius
( at least according to your own text, on-screen)
Great idea! Reminds me of Drake Landing Solar Community in Alberta, Canada, a neighborhood which stores so much energy in the summer that they can use it to heat all winter.
Exactly
It’s not a theory (any longer) but a proven solution that should be highlighted 🎉
And, how do they store it for long-term use ?
@@markhathaway9456 They store a heat in a large underground area all summer, and it stays warm enough to provide heat all winter. You can't easily insulate something this well for a single house, but you can for a neighborhood. (Heat escapes based on the size of the surface area but the total amount of heat/energy stored is based on the size of the volume.)
I first learnt about sand batteries in Bill Millisons 'Permaculture Designers Manual' printed in 1988. They called it an 'energy store' and it is used as low grade heat for heating houses, green houses, hot wateretc, which is what this type of heat is best for, and which incidentally is the energy most people need/ use.
Lithium battery $150/Kwh, Polar night Energy $85/Kwh, Batsand $2/Kwh. The insane potential of DIY sand battery.
I have contemplated creating a sand battery for personal home heating, using Sun tracking mirrors to heat the battery. Thank you for the video
It's fascinating how sand's ability to retain heat offers a sustainable and scalable option for energy storage. 🔥
water is three times better and much cheaper, if you keep it below 100°C
@@stefanweilhartner4415 *if*, and at those temperatures you lose a lot of the efficiency because the greater a temperature difference between two things, the quicker the heat transfer occurs. If you want to have a line of 80 degree air coming out of the tank, it would take significantly faster to get to that temp running through 800 degree sand than 98 degree water.
@@Fenthule but i don't need it quick in the center of the basement of a house.
@@stefanweilhartner4415 Water stores less heat, can corrode the tank or spring a leak.
For homes using rooftop solar power to heat the existing hot water tanks works fine already, but we are talking about grid storage here.
@@Fenthule Do you mean to say that the heat transfer is FASTER when the temperature difference is higher ? Or that it's FASTER with certain materials like water ?
We have water batteries here in Germany in some residential buildings. Those are basically huge tanks filled with regular water which is heated during the summer by solar panels and the heat is then stored and used during the winter to heat the building. It´s pretty simple. However producing electricity from heat is a bad idea, the loses are to great. However the overall efficiency of thie mentioned idea is way higher since the energy is stored in between seasons. The idea is fantastic because it´s rather cheap and technologically easy.
Could be an interesting use for all the unused office space in major cities. I imagine weight would restrict the number of floors able to be used, but buildings could easily have lower floors converted to thermal storage to help reduce heating and cooling cost, while also reducing the required occupancy rate. Especially if the building was able to store more energy than it used and was able to sell excess to surrounding office buildings.
I'm sitting here watching this and thinking "why does a sand battery have to be in an elevated silo or tower, why not just dig a big hole in the ground and fill it with the sand and equipment, then cover it over and use it for a parking lot, or sports ground, or any of the other possible uses for such an area?"
They store the sand in a silo because the walls of the silo are insulated to help maintain the internal temperature. They can put it under ground but then it would need reinforcement. A concrete box to protect it from pressure of a building or park on top of it.
@@victorlee447
That's not a sensible argument.
I wasn't suggesting that an underground container would not need reinforcement - that would be stupid. The walls of a silo also NEED to be reinforced.
So really, it does make more sense to put it underground then.
One missing point in this video is that the Li Ion batteries are Day storage, Sand Batteries can be used as seasonal storage, as Sand keeps the heat very long and is able to keep the heat from summer and move it to winter. On a limit, but much more than any other electrical battery system today!
Sir do video about fusion power
I think he did
Future tech, replicating the heat of the sun. Hard to ramp up but a lot of brainpower going into it.
Pretty good video, thanks for the details on the subject of sand batteries. It's great that low quality and can be used for this instead of beach/ocean sand etc
One thing that is really hard to quantify is the cost to downstream users.
The beauty of batteries is that users all already are set up to use power. If you want to bring a huge sand battery to share heat then every home or business needs to be set up tp directly use heat.
Perhaps that happens in some areas of the world - but none that I know.
Also, how much heat would be lost in distribution? How much would it cost to prepare infrastructure to move around that much heat without huge losses?
So many more factors to consider!
Thanks for the good video and view of something new!
which is why it is more interesting to use the heat to generate steam to run a turbine to create electricity
Umm as mentioned in the video it can be used for district heating, so you have a plant that provides hot water in a given area, nothing needs to change in the infrastructure outside of the plant, sure if you're running your own heating that's not gonna help much but it doesn't mean there are no use cases where it doesn't fit in perfectly
Building codes. Most of Europe has district heating. Most of North America doesn't.
If cities start planning to add this infrastructure, then you absolutely could see this in the future. Although most systems only change in response to scarcity or drastic disturbance.
In Alaska, they do use radiator/district heat. They also have underfloor piping as well as typical radiators.
Interesting tech. BTW heat can power refrigeration too, look up propane powered refrigerators
Sand (and better yet salt) might make a good heat battery but water and or salt might make a better cold battery.
Volumetric heat capacity for one cubic meter of
Water 4.184 MJ/m³*K
Sand 2.1 x MJ/m³*K
Salt 9.04 x MJ/m³*K.
Because water can't store heat above 100c without requiring significant pressure containment, while sand and salt can without much consideration for pressure changes. As to a cold battery for air conditioning, temperature is mostly limited by not wanting not freeze water condensation from air, so the temperature shouldn't go below 0c. Operating a heat pump over night will reduce the temperature drop and improve the heat pump's COP. But, both sodium chloride salt and water store more energy per cubic meter than sand.
OK, but working only in Sahara size. :)
For me one house one winter V 4000 m3, T 40-80 C, plus thermal insulation !!!
TOTALLY STUPID IDEA!
20m x 20m x 10m insulated sand battery block for only one house?!
THE SAHARA AND GOBI TOGETHER IS NOT ENOUGH FOR EVERYBODY WHO NEED THIS. BUT WE ALSO HAVE SOIL EVERYWHERE INSTEAD OF SAND!
THAT'S IT!
When it comes to heat energy storage, besides cost of the storage medium, volumetric heat capacity is an important consideration.
For instance silicon dioxide has a 1.855 J/(cm³*K) But sodium chloride is 9.04 J/(cm³*K).
This means sodium chloride can store more than 4.5× as many joules of energy for each degree of temperature rise in a cubic cm. Yet both cubes have the same surface area to lose heat over. In other words, for each joule a cubic cm of silicon dioxide stores, a cubic cm of sodium chloride rises in temperature by less than 1/4.5 that of the silicon dioxide. And how fast heat is lost given the same surface area and insulation is proportional to temperature.
Bulk sodium chloride and sand have similar cost so per cubic meter, so its volumetric heat capacity should take on a more important role in consideration.
When are going to do a video on tidal & ocean current power generation?......
Cold climates need heating for their houses and have a problem with snow blocking their roads. SOLUTION-Build sand batteries under the roads near the houses.The leakage of heat will keep the roads clear of snow
@13:55 Whoa! Ummm... I think you completely misunderstood or forgot your thermal conversion (gain/loss) data chart.
Also You simply can't just flip a switch and now you get instant opposite thermal conversion with thermal batteries.
Go back and look at your density and conductivity table, also your puny house interior air being converted into mass thermal sand battery (essentially backwards conversion) is utterly nonexistent as the availability of home living environmental control temp will never compete with the thermal sand loss, much less make any positive gains.
...
Essentially these sand batteries are nothing more than an above ground heat pump system, and once you think of these principles you'll understand that there are other viable and readily available media that are superior to sand ( but more expensive initially).
....
You also pointed out the great loss of total thermal capacity due to the heat loss from the walls...
Well, this is not the sands fault but piss poor containment design and lack of insulation barriers.... I think it would have been beneficial to point this out.
...
What seems to make these very inefficient sand battery systems attractive is the scalability.. you simply out-scale (by physical mass) the cost of the more efficient but initially more costly media to overcome the low efficiency of the sand.
If you have the space and don't mind having a massive monolith in your back yard or community, then this is probably fine, but I think it's dumb because the land could be used to build a superior thermal system using different media for a considerably smaller footprint.
I grew up in Alaska where we had similar systems and a massive community steam heat system and have experimented with thermal conversion systems as a hobby.
👍
Storing cold isn't going to be practical.
2 reasons:
1) Heat can be put into sand at 100% efficiency with cheap reliable heating elements.
2) You can store a ton of heat because there is no upper bound to temperature, even at absolute zero you could only get a small fraction of the energy storage.
A pretty good presentation this time. Though you threw people for a loop at the beginning tying sand batteries into renewable intermittency... which you can't really do outside of home heating. Sand doesn't really solve intermittency for electricity generation and city thermal distribution systems are really quite specialized whereas electricity is ubiquitous.
Your round-trip efficiency numbers seemed a bit goosed in the wrong direction. Not sure why they are so off but LFP batteries have roughly a 95% round-trip efficiency at the cell level (0.2C charging and discharging) ,for any application, and of course it is greater than 100% when you shove it through a heat pump. Throw in the electronics (but use a high battery bank voltage) and the AC-storage-AC round-trip efficiency (non heat pump) is around 92%. That is basically an unbeatable number.
Note that LFP battery costs are dropping like a rock and will almost certainly fall through $60/kWh this year (if CATL is to be believed). In bulk, actually, LFP cells are already south of $80/kWh right now so the lithium battery cost numbers you stated in the video ($150/kWh) are actually quite dated.
The quickly dropping cost of LFP batteries actually poses a huge challenge to the many alternative storage technologies.
-Matt
It’s very important that we define what kind of sand we’re talking about.
As I understand it, and it might’ve been on this channel, but if not it probably was Asianometry, not all sand is the same. The sand that we use for silicon wafers is a very special kind of sand that we don’t have such a large supply of compared with the demand for new microchips. It turns out this is not the kind of sand that you would find in deserts.
Assuming that the sand for these batteries is desert sand, then we’re probably OK. But if it is the same kind of sand that ends up often being the source for silicon for microchips, then there may be a problem with this.
I’m still a big supporter of gravity batteries. I’m not sure that the concrete block with crane system is the way to go. With gravity batteries, you don’t lose any energy while it’s being stored. And you can use just about any material as the weight for storage.
Here’s my idea: there’s a technology called plasma gasification which can be used to waste into a substance in addition to Certain metals and a form of methane gas that can be kept within the gasification system. System like this can get rid of the need for landfills and most recycling systems.
One of the concerns is what do you do with the glass block waste afterwards? Here’s an idea: use it for a gravity. Replace landfill land with this kind of system, then cover the landfill with solar and wind generation systems. As a waste is turned into glass blocks, form them into the correct shape for a crane based gravity power storage system.
For those not familiar, the concept is you use the powered operator crane which lifts up the storing potential energy at a greater height. When you want to reclaim the energy, the crane grabs the blocks and lets them drop, then powers a generator.
There is some power loss in this process, but it is better than not being able to generate it all.
And while there would be an eventual saturation from the gasification plant, the ability to make more blocks when they are needed means that the only limitation does such a system would be the land, and the height of the crane.
A heat battery in a greenhouse or passive solar residence during the winter, and then cover the windows during the summer (or plant deciduous trees south of it) so that it becomes a cold battery during the summer. Hmm…. It wouldn’t need such extreme temperatures on a residential scale in the first place, so the efficiency might actually be a pro instead of a con in this case?
It’s cute and fun to have the kitty system Think there was never a TV show, and I think that the driver is Michael Knight, but if I were to use this, I would want it to be aware of the real world, and know who I am. Maybe in a future update the system can learn the names of different people, identify their voices,and be aware that writer is a TV show, and that the system is based on that idea. Otherwise, I think the fiction of it would get old eventually.
I'm usually quite a big fan of this channel. However, I find this video to be slightly underwhelming. You seem to miss two crucial points:
1. heat batteries aren't a direct competitor of lithium ion / lfp (enter battery technology of choice here). Conventional batteries are quite good in storing (solar) energy generated by day to power the house at night. Heat batteries are better at storing energy generated in summer to convert (low worth) summer energy into high worth winter energy.
That is why they are mainly proposed in colder climates: not because they are that good in the cold, but because in the Northern countries the difference between solar power in summer and winter is way bigger than in countries closer to the equator.
Where I live in the Netherlands is not even that far north, but the difference between solar generation in winter and summer tends to be a factor of 5.
2. A KWh of heat is not as valuable as a KWh of electricity.
"Converting heat from a heat battery to electricity gives a round trip efficiency of only 50 - 60%"
However, using that 55% efficiency to power a heat pump with COP 3.5 (still low, mine did 4.5 last winter) suddenly means you convert 1 KWh of summer electricity into 1.925 KWh of heat in winter.
The cold battery is an interesting thourght, but would if water below 0°C still holds heat capacity of 4.182J/kg/K, I think that might be the better choice. Needs fact check and calculations.....
years ago, i had success heating sand with hot air in pipes, then, running ammonia and later naphthalene(from Coleman lantern fuel) through submerged tubes and powering a small steam engine. i dont know why this tech wasn't followed. i had a professor from Princeton university check it out and never heard again about it.
i moved away and on to other things.
-politics. dude, its really all about who owns/controls the labs and therefore the grants.
eliminate the grant process and you will see a tech boom like we had back in the MOTHER EARTH NEWS days.
I like your idea about using it to cool as well. It sounds like you are thinking of having more than one temperature bank. You could draw heat from one for your heating needs and sink heat to the other for your cooling needs. Keeping strategic temperature ranges in each would allow you to use passive heat transfer for most applications. At the lower temperature ranges you could also use hydronics for a passive transfer medium, and heat pump for active transfers.
It would be interesting to see what the net difference between heat needs and heat waste is in our homes. If we had staged temperature batteries we could capture waste heats and use them to preheat the thermal medium in the higher temp stages so that they require less energy.
Heat Needs: Dryers, Stoves, Ovens, Water Heaters, Home Heat - Air, Home Heat - Radiant Floors, Side Walk Snow Melting Coils, Roof Snow Melting Coils, Swimming Pools (maybe not in San Diego, but up hear in the North), Green Houses, Cold Lithium Batteries, etc.
Heat Wastes: Fridges, Freezers, Chilled Water Dispensers, Air Conditioning, Freeze Dryers, Green Houses, Hot Lithium Batteries, etc.
I'm thinking three to five stages, one really hot, and two at the opposite ends of the useful heat pump temperature spectrum. Perhaps two more, one at the freezing and boiling point of water, since it is probably the best passive medium. That would complicate the waste electrical power side of the equation a little bit more, but I wonder if it is worth it. I think of two exotic waste cases. The fictional Stillsuit worn on Arrakis (I loved that episode by the way), and the intricate thermal management of a real Tesla vehicle.
Questions:
1. It sounded like you were saying that they use sand as insulation too, which makes me wonder if we use much better thermal insulation, how long do you think we can we store heat. Can we save passive summer heat and use it in the winter? What about the opposite, save the absence of heat from the winter to sink heat to in the summer?
2. What are your thoughts about using deserts and glaciers to moderate the climate on mega scales? For instance, what if we tugged a huge iceberg from one of the poles to the California coast and moved the ice inland to Death Valley. It could take several years to complete, but the resulting ice melt would be inland where it is desperately needed, while lowering temperatures and not raising the sea level. (I got this idea from the movie: Brewster's Millions)
I'm waiting for you and Matt Ferrell to collaborate on an episode. You, him, and Grady Hillhouse produce my favorite channels.
Haven't Earthships been using this "earthworks as thermal buffering/battery" technique for decades already?
Is the only innovation here the ability to not wrap your house design around the thermal battery, so developers can keep stamping out standard post-WWII cookie-cutter suburban boxes?
All refrigeration, which includes air conditioning, is using heat to make cold. Nearly all installations use electricity to create that heat but there are gas refrigerators that use heat directly. So, refrigeration and air conditioning should be included in what can be powered with this technology. This make a big, difference to the ROI as air conditioning is powered during hot weather where the days are longest and the sun shines brightest.
For new builds the structure could be above a sand heat reservoir in the ground. In this way the efficiency could be further improved.
90% round trip efficiency, when the heat is used directly & only 65% efficiency when the heat is converted back to electrical power. I assume for both of these numbers that the heat was transformed from electrical power by using thermal resistance.
What would be the efficiency numbers, if a heat-pump was used instead? Using electrical power to "make" heat with thermal resistance, is as you said, almost 100% efficient, but heat-pumps are even better since they don't "create" the heat they just move it around. So would using heat-pumps instead of resistance make this process competitive with lithium-ion batteries in terms of efficiency?
Indeed, ideas about thermal storage like this are non-starters for efficient electrical storage to most engineers. Your figures about reconversion of stored heat energy to electricity are way too optimistic. Even the best thermal cycles, such as in nuclear plants, achieve ~33% thermal to electrical yield. So, a 3000 MW plant is required to produced 1000 MW electrical. The trouble to do this is also large in terms of capital plant and maintenance. The lay public is being mislead in most jurisdictions on this very point. Your problem on large scale heat storage is now thermal distribution - a very clumsy problem when there is no district heating infrastructure available. Only the nordic countries have gotten serious on thermal due to this very issue.
Otherwise, around 8:00 2-BIT makes an odd error- indicating that water cannot be heated above its critical temperature - what's with that? Nuclear plants will often employ (partial) supercritical heat to raise efficiency.
I really hope a private version is made, not just the commercial variety, we should have the option to get a sand battery, even if it's a community one.
I'm actually planning on building one at my home
Sand batteries would be great for domestic applications. They could be located under a driveway or garage and provide a hot & cold geothermal sump/source for heat pumps. Heat pump COP could be boosted significantly with this technology. It would be ideal for continental climates - hot days/cold nights. We have to get smarter with pumps and thermal distribution generally.
Stop adding music and sound effects. It's nothing more than a distraction. I'm really interested in the video, but I'm constantly distracted by these sounds. I gave up watching it. Please STOP IT!!
Good evening all. I like the cold storage concept and I wondering why one would spend money for a sand storage facility instead of going directly to Geo-thermal storage? One will still need battery storage to run the systems without grid assistance.
How big would a sand storage system need to be to to keep 100 square meters of your home, home X in location Y, comfortable throughout the year? I am embarking on a massive home remodel in California, and heating without Gas is starting to look like an excellent idea. Thanks 🦊Riki2Tails
I find my self disagreeing with your summary...
Heat to electric is a silly compairison...
Winter/summer.... Depends on the heatloss over time. (Unsure of the possibilities)
If you can stire up your summer excess, and then use it in the winter that would be the holygrale
Great topic. There have been many “batteries” like this. Simply a means of storing energy. The real killer app will be the super capacitor. The ability to store massive amounts of energy quickly could change everything. Imagine a super capacitor connected to a sand (heat) battery. Theoretically one could capture lightning instantly and then feed that into the sand battery. Then draw the energy out in a controlled fashion from the battery. It’s only a question of figuring out the materials and methods. Definitely not simple but it is physically possible
Sand batteries are a good idea, a simple and cheap method of storing heat in the warmer months for use in the winter months by making use of surplus green energy, this would be
ideal for North America/Canada, Northern Europe including Russia, and northern Asia including China to see them through December, January and February.
But given the amount of sand required, I would view it as impractical for an individual home, but if you are building a street of 30 houses, it could make sense to scarify one plot for a big sand battery (which could at least have the facia of being another house) and be capable of suppling heat to the other 29 houses.
It would definitely make sense for large buildings, like schools, hospitals, office blocks,Apartment block and shopping centres, although it could be argued that in a city there would not be enough space for a large sand battery, but what if the ground floor of any large building was to become the sand battery, and human activity were to start on the first floor, in a similar way the ground and first floor of a multi-story car park could be filled with sand to provide heat to surrounding buildings, alternatively you could bury the sand battery underground, but if a maintenance issue required you to empty it of sand this would be complicated.
There might even be a case for sand batteries to be situated next to the junctions of main roads, like crossroads, roundabouts, or sharp bends, anywhere were braking or cornering takes place, a sand battery could provide under road warming for 100 yards either side of a potential hazard point, just enough to prevent ice forming.
there is a growing number of places using district hot water systems to provide heating, may be there is the opportunity to combine an underground hot water reservoir heated by surplus green energy as district heating, and supplement that with an above ground sand battery also heat by surplus green energy
I am reasoning that a properly insulated sand battery should hold on to its heat much longer Than a water reservoir, and would therefore be used to top up the hot water reservoir right
through to the end of winter, with out having to rely on a fossil fuel back up, by thinking on multiple levels, you could get double the heat storage on the same ground area.
it's not "Batteries" it's just Energy conversions.
Real Batteries should act as passives storage's and minimum if not none energy conversions happens.
The system won't works if the whole closed loop systems got shutdown/inactive and the heat dissipates over time, it's just as silly as putting the extra power generated by the windmill or solar cells into series of electric motors to turn a compressor to compress air to be stored inside a closed vessels where if needed the compressed air can be used to turn a centrifugal wind electric generators.
I get it Western peoples got skin rash and acute allergic reactions with "Lithium" technologies since it was dominated and monopolized by communist China but making such an low efforts silly propaganda's as this "Sand Battery" is just shameless, I expecting more "scientific" and "Intelligence" than this snake oils try hard type of "Innovations".
I was expecting the similar Graphene advanced tech for energy storage comes up from the West to counter the communist China manipulations on Lithium not this nonsense.
One thing to remember when comparing the cost per kwh of a battery vs heat storage is that the electricity from the battery can be used with a heat pump which can have 400 to 500 precent efficiency in converting electricity to heat but also can be used for cooling. But in really cold environments, the sand battery seems like 8t could be a good idea.
But the heat could come from concentrated solar which is 95% efficient at catching sun rays instead of 20-25% photovoltaic with also a lot less copper silver silicon etc
I see a few problems here:-
How exactly are we gonna transfer energy in n out ?
Suppose we are using a steam driven turbine to take heat out it won't be abt to take all the energy. Like we will only be abt to exhaust 1000° C energy to 100° C energy coz steam can't exist below 100°C or so.
Will the hardware used to heat up the system be efficient enough to transfer all the heat to the sand ?
I keep hoping to see a solution that can do "seasonal" energy shifting, not just "daily". California has a surplus of solar power in Spring and Fall, but we have no practical way of saving this for Summer and Winter. Batteries are too expensive. Sand seems the same. Hydrogen generation is very capital intense for such relatively low annual usage. Ideas?
ITS FOR HEAT. Why are you always whining about electricity. This is for HEATING!
Is it 1100 Deg C or Deg F? At 3:15 your graphic conflicted with your statement. Which one is correct and please let's stop with dual units all together-- Pick one and stick with it- we can handle it.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, ideas and videos. Very interesting technology. Never heard of sand batteries before but makes sense. Over 30 years ago when I was in high school there was a fad building outdoor wood boilers from masonry with huge insulated sand heat storage banks around them. Recently saw a video and they were saying there are two types of sand in the world, not all sand is good for construction, sand that has been worn smooth as in a desert is not good for construction and in some parts of the world good sand is at a premium. Imagine that if this technology were to takeoff hugely sand might become the next lithium in commodities. 😂. With heat pumps becoming all the rage with the improvements in operating in cold conditions to heat. I’m wondering if anyone is developing high temperature output heat pumps for sand batteries, you can multiply your efficiency by using the electricity to move heat rather than just making it. I’d they were to use sand batteries for electricity production they really need to look into sterling technology. I know from previous reading when the internet first came out that sterling single piston cryocoolers can also work in reverse to generate electricity. At the time the limiting factor was the extremely small demand for them has driven the price up to a premium level. I often thought that the electric car might bring them to a cost affective level since they would need compact coolers for automotive air conditioning. Unfortunately making miniature compressors happened instead.
As far as your cooling idea I remember reading in a power trade magazine a few dozen years back of a ice cream company that was using off peak power to freeze an Olympic sized pool of water for cooling their plant. Wishing you and your family the best. Looking forward to seeing whatever creative videos you come up with next.
If your looking to explore sand batteries yourself perhaps take a page out of the SpaceX text book and build yourself a used grain silo inside a slightly bigger silo and then fill the space between the two with perlite like SpaceX did with their sight built fuel tanks. I’ve heard on several farming channels that used grain bins are a thing and since the farmers are going to be hit hard financially in the upcoming year you might be able to get a sweet deal.
Why couldn't it be used in summer for air conditioning? Certain refrigerators are powered by propane heat to cool, so why not sand batteries to power air conditioners?
Imagine if the sand bank was buried and you build a greenhouse on top
All leaks make for a tropical greenhouse in like canada as you can draw extra if needed but losses are just warm soil used for agriculture
The problem with using the heat directly is that the most sand exists where we don't need the heat! Turns out, Phoenix and Las Vegas aren't clamoring for heat for most of the year. Yes, we still need hot water, but maybe electricity is still the best use.
That said, the "negative heat' aspect is interesting. But I don't think it's grid-capable.
I know you said you're experimenting with a new setup. I just wanted to give my feedback that your audio still has a long way to go.
If you take the one stroke video for example the clarity on that video is very noticeably better than more recent vids.
Hope you can get it sorted 😊 I can deal with poor graphics or anything else really, but audio is number 1 for me. I stopped watching one of your videos after a few minutes, which is the first time ever.
The "cold battery" has precedent. Do a search on "ice bear" systems which basically take "cheap" electricity at night (assuming time of use billing) and lower ambient temperature to create cost-effective ice, and then during the day the air conditioner is plumbed to run the through the ice as part of the condenser that greatly reduces the load on the main compressor. While sand could be effective here, the phase change of water stores a lot more thermal energy (or lack of thermal energy in the case of cold storage) per KJ and per volume than sand, so I'm not sure the economics would be competitive for a sand-based model by comparison since you can't go as far below ambient with cooling as you can go above ambient with heating (absolute zero is much closer to ambient than the 1100F is above ambient) that negates the main advantage that sand has in a heating scenario when trying to use it in a cooling one. That said, you should totally do a story around thermal storage for cooling as that is much more applicable to much of your U.S. audience.
If you want to store cold, liquid nitrogen would probably be better because of the phase change (14:40). You're also have an absolute limited of 300 degrees of temperature difference because it's impossible to store below absolute zero.
Why is the Sand Battery built above ground and not below? Curious.
You state that this wouldn't work very well during the summer (other than your "cool battery" you mention later on). However, this would work great in the summer as well for "passive" cooling. Using a large radiator of sorts above the home, create an updraft through the home cooling from conduit that's in the ground. Even if not using it to "directly" cool the home, use this cooler air as the ambient "outside" air for an airconditioner to transfer heat into out of the home, making the aircon far more efficient.
The pumping would almost be not needed for this type of loop as convection would keep hot liquid at the top of the draft tower/vent.
Hello. I w recently learned a lot about the TESLA baseless turbine. I honestly think it is viable, needs 2024 engineering. Some great content online about it and I can see you making a great video about the possibilities.