LOL, "those of you still using the wrong calibration system"

This is the kind of stuff I like to hear about: using existing infrastructure to take advantage of renewables, without having to invent "magic tech". I'm also glad to hear that this kind of stuff is happening here in Finland, innovation in renewable energy is how we can stay relevant as a small country.

I know not all solutions to storing energy will be this simple, but sometimes it's amazing how "Just heat some sand" or "Just pump water up a hill" can cover a huge amount of the problem.

Britain made a good start with district heating by planning a heating grid powered by Battersea Power Station. As I understand it, when the Electricity Act of 1947 established the British Electricity Authority, that took over control of all existing power stations, they decided that selling heat was not in their remit, and decided that no future power stations would sell heat. But it was in their remit to promote the use of electric fires, electric radiators etc. this sounds clean and neat until you realise that they built power stations along the Thames in London using about 3 times the coal to supply electric heat than was required to produce the same heat in people's coal fires. The smoke from the power stations was a major contributer to the London smog, so they declared a smokeless zone, so people had to burn more electricity (or coal gas - but check out how much more coal that burned. The power stations (and the gasworks) were except from the smokeless zone rules! In my second year working in London, I was astonished by a smog in about February 1974, when my employer (Hawker Siddeley Aviation) closed the factory early and sent us home. Finding the traffic at a standstill, no chance of a bus coming any time soon, I walked home to Richmond. I remember worse smogs in Edinburgh before it went smokeless in 1958, but hadn't seen a smog since then. London still had Battersea, Chelsea, Kingston, and I don't know how many other power stations in the London Basin pouring out coal smoke. You could not see more than on car length ahead of you on the road. I could hear the blast of foghorns from ships about 12 miles downriver.

We had "city steam" when I was a kid in Lockport, N.Y. U.S.A. The steam plant (downtown) was about 1/2 mile from us and the steam pipes were connected to probably 200 or so houses and businesses. No 'furnace' in the basement, just clean and efficient steam heat.

In Vienna (austria) they will installed a huge heat pump at the sewage treatment plant wich will produce enough heat to heat 300.000 homes.

I must congratulate you Dave, you actually made it thru the pronunciation of our Finnish names! Most of Finnish cities and smaller towns have a district heating system using various heat sources. In the countryside, electric heating, heatpumps and firewood are used. We mostly have a nice 20-22 C indoor temperature regardless of the outdoor weather.

Dave, Have you seen Kensa's quite sensible scheme for using a low temp district heating system? Essentially this uses a low temperature distribution system which doesn't need insulation or fancy pipes to distribute water at a very modest temperature around an urban network. Each house then has what amounts to a ground-source heat pump to boost the temperature to what is needed to heat that particular home. The heat pumps work with a very high COP, seeing as the temperature rise is very modest. The individual home owners retain control of their heating. What's not to like?

In Minnesota I lived in a place with district heating and cooling and it was great. It was included in the rent which made for a nice cool summer. Would recommend.

Certainly seems the most hopeful of all the green solutions for keeping warm.

At our household, we've gone all in on solar panels and electrifying our furnace, our hot water heater, one of our vehicles, all our landscaping tools, and our other appliances. Our solar panels provided 68% of our electricity for 2023. Some might say, oh well that proves that solar isn't enough. I say, hey, we're 68% there already. From total reliance on fossil carbon to 68% not relying on fossil carbon is a pretty good achievement. But yes, there's still this big hole in our dream of getting all our energy from the sun, the Cache Valley, Utah, winter. During winter, our furnace is ravenous for up to 50 kW-hrs a day at exactly the time our solar panels are producing between nothing and 10 kW-hr per day. We have 27 kW-hr of battery storage but that is a pittance of what we need. What we need is more like a 1 MW-hr battery. That might happen one day, but right now, an affordable 1 MW-hr electrical storage battery is not on the horizon. But wait. What if, instead of an electrical storage battery, we had a 1 MW-hr thermal storage battery we could draw upon during the winter? Bingo, that just might plug the hole of winter. I'm not sure it would pencil out, but it'd be worth running some numbers on it.

I'm actually working on a household heat storage device. Ceramic kiln filled with firebrick. Heat it when power is cheap, crack lid when power is Expensive.

Having invested in Ripple cooperative wind and solar generation schemes I would also be quite keen to invest in storage solutions like these 👍😀

I am, as ever, grateful for the professional information !

If you didn't know Vattenfall is ''waterfall'' in English, it comes from ''Royal Waterfall Board'' which was the Swedish state's electric power company (and still is)

Poor Dave, he had his work cut out for him today. Even one or two of our Finnish words/names are an effort for English speakers but oh my you had a bumper crop of them in this video. 😂❤😂

Smart of Findland to start concentrating on storage. They'll need all they can get when the AMOC stops.

There is a hockey stadium complex where I live. The heat removed when making the ice is pumped to a nearby swimming pool where it is used for space heating, heating water in the swimming pool and heating water for showers. This is an application which can be adapted for other facilities such as cold storage warehouses where large amounts of heat are now just expelled into the atmosphere but instead be stored in a heat battery such as the one mentioned in the video. Another good application would be capturing the waste heat to heat greenhouses.😀

Thanks for the new video! It's nice to see Polar Night making progress. Maybe Finland can be an example for the rest of us. District heating makes so much sense, it's just the efficiency you get from scaling things up.

In Newcastle there is "The Byker Wall " a continuous block of 600 houses built in the 1970s which has always had community heating.

Thanks. Sometimes it's good to have hope restored.

"Using the wrong calibration system"😂

In the late 1970's, I worked in the underground division of an electric utility in Portland, OR, USA. There was steam piped to nearly every building in the city center. Originally lots of cheap steam was available from in-city wood-products mills & power plants. When those closed, the utilities installed huge inefficient electrical boilers. District heating is very viable in cities. This is a terrific idea.

Another great and hopeful episode. Thanks.

I live in the UK too and I don't need to tell you how amazing our government is at doing good things 😢

Enjoying yet another great video from Just have a think. Thanks.

Kind of like geothermal, but requiring the energy be first input. Hey, whatever works

Almost 90 % of the inhabitants here in Iceland are connected to a district heating service that make use of geothermal heat. If someone develops technology for digging deeper wells more cost efficient, the same could be done many other places.

It's still frosty! This spring has been crazy cold (Finland). Great tech too, sand batteries

Wattenfall has built district heating solutions in the Netherlands as part of the transition away from gas. Customers are very unhappy because the rates are up to 3 times higher than in neighbouring countries. Once connected a customer/renter is left at the mercy of Wattenfall’s drive for profit.

Fahrenheit the "wrong calibration system" Haha. I love it. The temperature in Latin I call it.

Many years ago a show appeared on Australian TV featuring a British Public Housing initiative. The design incorporated the two main sources of expenditure - beer and bread - in the form of a bakery and microbrewery with scavenged energy sent through the apartments in the multi story building. The future seems to be in decentralised self supporting integrated food, energy and heat production. And most governments push back against such holistic solutions.

People who say wind and solar will never be viable technologies are the same kind of people who said cars can never be self driving, subways could never be driverless, and elevators could never go without an operator. They are what I call, wrong.

For 2 fukin years I was commenting on every blog, KZfaq channel to build sand batteries like Finland does! HALLELUJAH! 👍👍💪 The so cold experts in terms of knowledge are lagging 10 years !

another positive effect of this system, that the electric power used in summer for the inverters is when there is a surplus of solar power and there is (often) a negative price for electricity.

Thanks for yet another excellent video

This renewable will have relatively lower carbon footprint. Sand is also one of most abundant resources available on the planet.

Local heating is big in Denmark, too 👍Thanks for an excellent video with some needed hope for the future…

This in combination with seasonal energy storage would be a gamechanger.

if i remember right our old radiators in uk used to have like breeze blocks inside them that were heated by water and it radiated that heat from these bricks.. sounds pretty much the same thing

Another great episode! In principle, thermal storage gets better the bigger it is. Even a sufficiently large pile of [dry] sand could technically store all the heat we want, even with reasonably good round trip efficiency. And as long as the price of power keeps fluctuating between negative and astronomic, extracting some of that stored energy as power can be very reasonable even with modest energy efficiency. I haven't heard/read about underground thermal storage where the pressure is utilized to keep water well over 100 °C before, seems like a "no-brainer" to figure out to me, water has some really great advantages for thermal storage, and when you get most of the "pressure containment" to be able to increase the temperature well beyond 100 °C for free by placing it deep in the ground, it's strange that it isn't the norm. Still, I don't get why they want to heat air or water by resistive heating, and pump the heated air and water to the storage, when they can have the resistive heaters in the storage. I get it when other heat sources is used, and the need to transport heat out in some working fluid, but to just add heat from resistive heating to the storage, it seems impractical in a number of ways.

Finns are very practical about technology, and it is joy to watch them at work 😊

thanks for the update!

(clears throat) Interestingly, there is no such thing as "common sand." Sand comes from different minerals, is created by different erosional processes, has different grain sizes, different angularity/smoothness/air gaps, and so on, and as a result has different physical properties. Some sand of particular properties, such as that used in construction, is indeed running out, leading to sand theft and sand smuggling. It would be interesting to know if they're using sand with any particular properties in this.

I did hear of one of those heat networks working in Sheffield gathering heat from the steel works, til they shut down.. 😢

I live in the UK in Essex (Basildon) and our estate (1973 build) was designed by a Scandinavian architect and we have a central estate heating system where the water and heating is run by a system that uses high pressure steam. In the recent years its changed from gas and oil to create the steam. I think the idea is great, but using oil or gas has its problems, our heating the last 2 winters has been expensive, the council bid for the current fuel at a price that was massively affected by the situation in Russia, so this system would suit our estate I'm sure.

I’ve been looking for a follow up - so thank you for this update

Always happy to see your videos

Really happy to see these two projects on a worthy channel discussed. They have been quite well noticed on the national news here in Finland but i'm always pedsimistic on how well this is actually received in other parts of the world. Really interrested to see how they play out.

Finland is awesome.

I am part of a district heating system in London and whilst they are great in principal they are very expensive in the UK due to a lack of regulation. My understanding is that systems in Finland etc. are well regulated. Most of my bill is made up of a daily standing charge, with £/kwh being extremely low. So, it doesn't really matter how much I use, I basically get charged the same. Great if you are a family of 4, not great if you are a household of 1 who spends most of the day at the office. Although in fairness, this pricing structure meant we were relatively protected during the recent energy price spike.

Seems that this project is like the Drake Landing Solar Community in Okotoks, Alberta, Canada. They have solar collectors on all of the roofs, which then pump the heat into an underground storage facility that keeps it there until they need it in the winter. The Canadian project seems more intelligent because you’re not trying to use a wind turbine to make electricity and then convert it to heat, where you’re going to have losses. The sun provides plenty of heat. All we need to do is make sure to store that heat for the winter.

Well done, as always. We rarely thank or pay homage to KZfaq for providing a platform that allows the greatest cross-fertilization of ideas in human history. Take a bow, KZfaq!

TES is so slept on. I swear, I work in the energy sector in NY USA, and all anyone ever talk able is more renewables. No one talks about storage, and when they do it's only ever about batteries.

Keep posting positive news, when possible!

Great show. Thanks again.

Excellent coverage.

Great video.... very encouraging to hear!

Excellent presentation.

Good to see these systems being realised so quickly. I guess it's urban building complexes next and finally a big sand thermal sump under our suburban driveways to make our heat pumps into 'cheat pumps' rather than trying to squeeze heat from a literal ice cube.

Fahrenheit, the wrong calibration system! I love you, Dave

Brilliant. Keep it simple

The fact that much of the transition is pretty low key and relatively silent makes it also pretty unstoppable. Which scares the gigawatts out of the fossil fuel people.

Thanks for another great video, they really do give me hope that there's a possibility of a better future. Take care out there folks 👍

Thanks for your informative clips. Using low temperature thermal energy for low temperature home and water heating makes so much sense.

Suomi mainittu, tiedät mitä tehdä 👍

Thanks

thank you again from the USA

So £62500 per household, great value over 5 years, well done Bristol 😮

Gracias

Sounds good, lets keep an eye on this.

Love It!! 🖖

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. I am less convinced by the huge underground hot water idea, mainly for the reason that water gives up its heat very easily, which is good when it is giving up its heat through a metal radiator to heat your house, but is bad for trying to maintain temperature of a reservoir (which is the main reason why 30 years ago I gave up on hot water cylinder and immersion heater system, for the combination gas boiler which heats water only when I use it, were as the immersion heater had to switch on several times an hour, just to maintain the temperature of the cylinder, even when I was not using any water) so I am sceptical about how long you could maintain a useful temperature even in a very large reservoir. However, I am aware that district heating systems using hot water are increasingly popular plus, the components for such infrastructure are readily available, so I am going to propose a solution to my own criticism. What I assume I can see in your broadcast is a series of very large concrete tanks in which hot water would be stored, and pipes connecting to a cities district heating system, then I presume a concrete roof with 130 feet of soil on top, I would like to suggest an alternative set up, again have your very large concrete tanks for storing hot water, but from the corner of each tank you have a concrete column or pile rising 130 feet to the surface to form the basis of a concrete raft on which you build a sand battery with pipes connecting the sand battery to water reservoir. 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. Either a hot water reservoir or a sand battery would be an acceptable method of using surplus green energy to heat our buildings, and combined they could be very effective, but I am sceptical of these systems being used for electricity generation, which I believe would be better served by some form of chemical energy storage such as Hydrogen. I find it annoying that if you mention Hydrogen some people spit out their dummy and shout about the round-trip efficiency being very poor, you lose 25% of your energy turning electricity to Hydrogen, and you lose another 25% of your energy turning Hydrogen back to electricity, so you are losing half your energy, and of course you would want any system to be at least 95% efficient, but the only one that comes anywhere close to that is a lithium-ion battery, but cost of providing enough lithium-ion batteries for a country to cover a 6 or 12-hour gap is staggering, never mind trying to cover the 3 months of winter, so you need something cheap like sand or water for heating and yes Hydrogen for electricity generation, Plus, we are likely to need Hydrogen for planes, ships and heavy vehicles where batteries would not be appropriate, and it should not matter if you lose 50% of your energy in the process, it would be a problem if you were using a fossil fuel to generate the initial electricity, but if it is coming from a wind turbine where is the problem, as it stands at the moment we switch our wind turbine off when it gets too windy because we have no whereTo store the surplus energy that could be generated.

At 140°C, the water will also remain sterile.

This was an interesting program. Have you covered the giant heatpump they are using to extract warmth from the sea water to the district heating system of Esbjerg, Denmark?

Basically just scaled "economy 7 storage heaters". Anyone else remember them? 😊

Short and sweet. Costs per Watt would be good even if very approximate? Thank you Dave and your super Patrons

You can even boil water quite easily with concentrated solar, If they can store it all underground and it lasts through the winter you wouldn't even have to generate any electricity to boil a lot of the water.

Thermal is one of the storage solutions I'm most excited about because it seems the most sustainable. My question though is how we will heat them. Heat pumps could potentially offset losses of the system.

Wonder why Vantaan don't use a liquid that *doesn't* need to be pressurized to maintain a high temperature? (Cost, possibly).

Storing excess renewable electricity as heat rather than electric I always feel is second best. However, if it is cheap enough and has potential for seasonal transfers of energy then there is definitely a use case in northern climates where peak heat needs are in winter. From the descriptions in the video, it also looks like sand batteries can store heat at higher temperatures, not perhaps very high temps, but at least mid-temperatures, above that easily achieved with heat pumps, which have many industrial uses.

Heat storage sounds like an obvious good idea, with nothing but inertia to stop it from being the dominant technology for very-large-scale long-term energy storage. But that leaves a lot of applications where the flexibility of hydrocarbons will probably mean it's better to capture CO2 from the air, make hydrocarbons out of it, and fuel existing devices. Underground stuff is expensive. I don't think there's any adequate reason to put a heat-storage system deep underground instead of a bit farther out of town where the land cost is affordable.

Good news about the thermal energy storage projects, thanks! 👍 Smaller scale sand thermal storage by BatSand (from Latvia) is expensive and requires 30+ kW in solar panels but it should stil be viable for apartment blocks managed by housing communities or hotels or other companies requiring on industrial heat.

Thank you for the commentary. This is good news. A basically simple principle. Have you covered the MIT Concrete battery? Massive concrete structtures could serve double duty.

Many people have Photo Voltaic Panels. How about using this type of technology (on a far smaller scale) Hose by House or Street by Street to harvest & store direct heat energy. Both Hot water and Hot Air solar panels were designed for roof-top use decades ago. But they never got much use because we needed an efficient long term heat-battery to store heat for use later.

my experience of finns is limited, but what i read suggests they are smart and practical, more than most. if they can operate a green economy with so little sunshine, any one can.

Almost everyone in the UK already uses District heating. If you use mains gas or electricity for heating then that is effectively district heating, it's just that the heat is arriving in a different form. If you're wanting space heating and hot water it shouldn't really matter whether that energy arrives through a pipe as gas or through a piper as hot water. f you want completely independent heating you're going to have to go fully off grid.

This is awesome.

What about mining out the rock, insulating the cavern, filling the cavern with some of the excavated rock plus heat input and output equipment. The rock holds a lot more heat per volume than water, so you have to mine a smaller volume.

Cardiff Council have also invested in district heating

Great video, Dave, we're trying to push these ideas in Saarland

As a finn I find these solutions troublesome due to almost every city around here building these huge electric kettles to make carbon free heating. The problem comes from the Nord pool policy of giving electricity producers free hand to take any price they want based on the most expensive option needed to generate the demanded electricity. Since cost of making electricity is fixed with many methods such as nuclear and wind, there is potential to make crazy profits in the times of no wind or maintenance of nuclear reactors. Last winter the highest nord pool price was 2 e/kwh..

The north Europeans seem so innovative. As an environmentally conscious german I'm enve

I’d like to see something for farms. Central battery that could heat a couple of houses, barns, greenhouses and equipment shops.

Its a great idea, but will only work in new towns, or areas that already have communal heating systems. No chance it can work in a place like UK with individual heating systems as the infrastructure costs would be impossible to fund.

What of the delivery infrastructure…. The tie into tall the individual user facilities. Thousands of kilometers of piping to be run and hooked into non-existent exchangers? Or sterling engine to convert to electricity and tie into current grid?

This is more than a glimmer of hope on the horizon and could be our salvation, IF the Turkeys vote for Christmas, that's the stumbling block. A few months ago, I didn't see Rishi Sunak investing in this carbon neutral opton. Instead he decided to provide more oil and gas licenses.....Don't vote for political parties that aren't genuinely driving green energy. Sadly this clip reminds me that in my first job as a twenty year old in 1973 at the Atomic Energy Establishment Harwell, I visited the Hydraulics research centre in Wallingford, Oxfordshire. The guys there demonstrated their prototype electricity generator powered by wave action. That was 51 years ago. Both sand and water were in abundance as far as I remember :) So all that time has passed and I've still got an oil tank in my back garden. I wonder why change has been so slow? Probably something to do with money generated from oil sales.....

I'm curious what kind of energy loss the water cavern battery has since something that big is likely not insulated. If your source of energy is mostly waste heat and excess electricity then it shouldn't matter much so long as the energy loss rate is not crazy.

Using the Bath Tub Model…Replacing high cost energized hot water with low cost de-energized cold water within the common storage cavern would degrade the performance and eventually neutralize any benefits. The thermal dynamics of Two separate storage caverns isolating hot from cold would seem to be more efficient. Unless the rate of thermal hot replacement = cold …

Cooperative community provision is the path forward...