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Finnish City Inaugurates 1 MW/100 MWh Sand Battery

(cleantechnica.com)
190 points erwinmatijsen | 3 comments | 03 Sep 25 06:00 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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petesergeant ◴[03 Sep 25 07:31 UTC] No.45113183[source]▶
I live in a desert where we have district cooling (and no shortage of sand or solar power), instead of district heating. Wonder if they can pull off the same trick.
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phh ◴[03 Sep 25 08:18 UTC] No.45113421[source]▶
Well you can't really do -600C sand (or anything), so the benefits of sand VS water largely diminished. "just" freezing water already gives you around 300C equivalent of sand (if my napkin is correct).

Also the point of this plant is to exploit the counter-correlation of cheap electricity and cold. Usually there is a bigger correlation between cheap electricity and heat.

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1. dzhiurgis ◴[03 Sep 25 08:36 UTC] No.45113500[source]▶
> you can't really do -600C sand (or anything)

You can if you stagger AC/HP or even peltier elements.

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2. myrmidon ◴[03 Sep 25 08:43 UTC] No.45113548[source]▶
You misunderstood-- temperature is physically limited to -273°C, this is not an engineering problem. You have a smaller usable temperature range in a "cold storage" than with heat from fundamental physics alone.
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3. dzhiurgis ◴[03 Sep 25 19:58 UTC] No.45119806[source]▶
Damn you got me there!