The Power of Sand Batteries -- Revolutionizing Energy Storage...

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🌟 The Power of Sand Batteries: The Future of Energy Storage? 🌟
In the quest for sustainable energy, finding ways to store all that extra power is a big challenge. Enter: sand batteries! 🏜️💡 These incredible innovations store thermal energy and could be the game-changer for home heating. Imagine cozy winters powered by sand!
Could sand batteries be the key to our energy storage future? Let's dive into this sandy solution and explore how it could revolutionize home heating! 🔥🏠✨

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00:00 - Intro
00:42 - How Sand Batteries Work
02:06 - The Necessity of Energy Storage Solutions
02:42 - Introducing the World's First Commercial Sand Battery
03:16 - Understanding the Mechanics of Sand Batteries
06:14 - The Advantages of Using Sand in Energy Storage
08:56 - Challenges and Limitations of Sand Batteries
11:26 - Comparing Sand Batteries to Lithium Ion Solutions
13:57 - Envisioning the Future: Sand Batteries and Beyond
14:53 - Closing Thoughts and Future Prospects

[jonjohns]

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.

[halburd]

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

[alansnyder]

Let's call them "thermal batteries", so people won't think they compete with electrical batteries.

[bretthaddock]

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!

[rowanshole]

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.

[kevinc-]

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

[dellmerlin]

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.

[Plussizedrenovation]

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.

[markjones]

I have contemplated creating a sand battery for personal home heating, using Sun tracking mirrors to heat the battery. Thank you for the video

[EfficientEnergyTransformations]

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.

[John......]

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

[rayzerot]

I stopped consuming any media concerning the development of battery technologies a decade ago. I'm glad I did. None of them went anywhere

[leokimvideo]

I've never been inside a hot Pyramid, so yeah sand is fantastic at cooling as well

[Fenthule]

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.

[ashtaroth]

It could be use to store excess heat from data centers to improve the efficency.

[alderocher]

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!

[lkrnpk]

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.

[SkepticalCaveman]

That heat could be used for saunas even in the summer, or heating swimming pools.

[sierraecho]

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.

[anthonycarbone]

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.