I like the idea of doing this at the grid level. Especially if locally you have heat pumps on all houses, so it's really just topping up.
this post was submitted on 17 May 2024
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Storing heat energy seems like an incredibly inefficient way to store energy.
+90% efficiency. It drops when converting to electricity.
The article I read said they don’t currently have an efficient way to convert it back to electrical energy. Current tech is 30% efficiency.
Interesting idea but i think we’re many years from this being commercially viable.
While it can be used in localized electrical power generation, this isn't exactly best suited for just that. According to the video, the typical household uses 60% of their energy towards heating on average. This type of battery would already be storing thermal energy in the form that you need for this, so any conversion losses would already be accounted for; it would just be radiative losses while distributing the heat.
Just use it for applications that need heat directly instead of electricity. Heating your home, your hot water, preheating your oven. And tbh even at 30% and that is better than the 0% we have when there's nowhere for renewable energy to go and it has to just be shut off. If the sand battery can be made very quickly and easily and cheaply the inefficiency doesn't matter so much at the moment because we just need fucking somewhere to put it
The video shows a commercial application with +60% RTE.