General > General Technical Chat
"Gas Armageddon": Energy/electricity prices in EU/UK (and how to deal with them)
tom66:
Does the amount of sand particularly matter - you build it once and it lasts 30 years? You may as well complain about concrete used for nuclear reactors, as that's not zero carbon production either.
Also 7MWh / 7000 euro = 1kWh / euro, over 100x cheaper than a Li-Ion battery... obviously the infrastructure is not free but it seems like something worth investigating.
JohanH:
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/05/sand-shortage-the-world-is-running-out-of-a-crucial-commodity.html
"the world consumes roughly 40 to 50 billion tons of sand on an annual basis"
"Desert sand grains, eroded by the wind rather than water, is too smooth and rounded to bind together for construction purposes."
From this it sounds like there would be no problems with sand shortage for thermal storage purposes, as you don't need the construction quality sand.
tautech:
There is no doubt the future rests on electricity as the primary energy source however the debate is how to produce it. For the immediate need urgency is utmost for the stability of business and life therefore a policy reversal of closing coal fired generation and mining is required to provide the fastest solution in the short term before all those in northern Europe freeze this Christmas.
Then like it or not a longer term solution will be required and most probably nuclear where wisdom would place it in lesser populated areas to have it wired around the EU just as Ruskie gas is now.
Once you have endless GWhrs the modern and more efficient heating/cooling solutions can be rolled out to further reduce the reliance on fossil fuels of any type and from any source to then also satisfy the GloBull warming believers.
Yes there is a crisis, 2 actually, but which offers the more immediate danger to life as we know it ?
Hardly rocket science from where I'm sitting. :P
dzseki:
--- Quote from: JohanH on August 26, 2022, 06:10:12 am ---
--- Quote from: NiHaoMike on August 25, 2022, 10:28:47 pm ---
There's thermal storage that's very cost effective for a few days. Some larger installations might be able to push it to a few weeks before insulation costs render it impractical.
--- End quote ---
There is a Finnish concept of storing heat in sand that keeps the heat for months. Currently the first product has been installed with 8 MWh capacity. It's cheap and seems to work.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-61996520
--- End quote ---
We have been talking about this with the colleagues (engineers and physicists) the other day.
Sand has heat capacity about 1/5 of water’s, but the temperature of the sand here is 500°C, so why not just use (salted) water then?
Also heating up to 500°C screams for resistive heating which is „inefficient”. Using water you can heat up to eg. 60°C (in summer time maybe even more) with a heat pump, and only use resistive heating in the last portion until close to boiling.
BTW, here in Hungary residential users are getting 1730m^3 gas (/ year) at a very attractive price: 0.25EUR/m^3, they say this is the grand average of residential usage. Above that consumers have to pay market(like) prices.
For fun I’ve calculated that the amount of heat attained by burning 1730m^3 gas can be stored in about 180 tons of water with dT of 80°C, 180 tons of water can be stored in a cube with edge length of 5.65m which isn’t sound that insane IMO.
Bud:
You will run out of salt supply much faster than sand, imho.
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