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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.
I like these technologies. They may not be as energy efficient as using more exotic materials, but what they do use is simple, cheap and often sourced locally. Such economic factors are often as important to the ROI as the purely scientific ones.
yes and given that the energy you put in is practically free, it doesn't matter if it's not as efficient.
It doesn't list the advantages over water, which seems the most common in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_energy_storage systems. You'd think water would be easier to exchange heat with since it can slosh around the heat exchanger elements in the tank more easily. Which should translate to lower costs since you don't need as many exchanger structures in the medium. Any guesses for the motivation in using sand?…
Even the lower range doesn't leave much delta in best case of boiling water. So you would need some type of heat pumps instead much simpler heat exchangers. So that is also one cost optimization.
So why a surface sand silo instead of going down and using the soil/clay/bedrock/whatever is there? Ease of installation and maintenance?
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.
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For this specific use case, you need to heat to far above the boiling point of water to retain some thermal efficiency. Sand/rock is better suited for storing the thermal energy at ~500 celcius.
I wonder if there are any chemical effects from heating the sand to 500 degrees Celsius. Finely roasted sand.
That said in practice, at scale... before filling up your storage tank you'd probably need to pre-heat it once to remove all moisture and volatile gunk adsorbed onto the sand.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For this specific use case, you need to heat to far above the boiling point of water to retain some thermal efficiency. Sand/rock is better suited for storing the thermal energy at ~500 celcius.
I wonder if there are any chemical effects from heating the sand to 500 degrees Celsius. Finely roasted sand.