World's first 'sand battery' can store heat at 500C for months at a time.

Not to mention that we have about 300 million more people. We don't have many places that are "the middle of nowhere" left here in the US. You have plenty!

 

This may be the one that failed. It never achieved more than 50% of the predicted output capacity.

 

I know - when it comes to climate change the Canadians are all sitting on icebergs waiting for it to get warmer lols!!

 

I think it's success would need to be measured on it's actual production and cost of construction, though.

 

I don't find evidence of China using these mirror strategies. As the world leaders in clean energy, that seems interesting.

For solar, they may be depending on solar panels that produce electricity.

https://www.reuters.com/business/en...-more-than-double-first-half-assn-2022-07-21/

 

But in the US, solar projects are STOPPED, because China is how we get solar panels and the Commerce Department is concerned that China may be avoiding tariffs.

I wonder how long the Commerce Department is going to halt US solar.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/29/climate/solar-industry-imports.html

 

The solar salt towers allow for energy storage in the form of molten salt. Solar panels cannot store energy. So you are talking apples and oranges.

How do they store electric power?

 

I was just curious about the potential for 500 C [932 F]. In particular I was wondering about the Carnot Efficiency, which tells us the maximum efficiency of any heat-driven engine [really any thermodynamic cycle]. The equation for this is


where you do the calculations using Kelvin and n is the efficiency as a decimal value. Unfortunately this can only achieve a maximum of less than 0.61 (61%) efficiency - the high temp is the max temp of the sand, and the low temp is the typical air temp. So in practice we might expect something in the lower-mid fifties at best. But at scale that is enough to be practical if the thermal transfer efficiency is high enough. But sand is a poor conductor of heat. I would expect this to present design challenges for all but very low instantaneous demands. So industrial uses seems iffy to me. But for things like heating homes and pools and large buildings, it may make sense.

 

"World's first 'sand battery'"

is it the first though, or did ancient civilizations already discoverer this?

 

exactly, even 61% efficiency of energy that would be 100% wasted without it, is not bad though

 

It isn't really a discovery. And I'm sure that somewhere along the line, someone was using the heat in sand for something!

 

It doesn't represent wasted energy. You still have to heat the sand. It isn't free. But you can heat the sand using low-cost electricity as opposed to high-cost electrical power [when everyone needs it].

It is also a way to store energy from your solar panel array. But that would be pretty inefficient. It is best to sell that back to the grid if you can.

In fact, now that I think about it, the total energy cycle is probably very inefficient. I would bet you lose at least 70% [60% x 50% [assuming this is the heating efficiency while you charge the same] = 30%] of the energy due to inefficiencies. So maybe it doesn't make sense. With only a 30% return on your energy investment, you would be better off paying more for the electricity.

 

right, exactly, if you did not do that, and it was a loss, then doing it is a gain

 

right, but if you did not do that, the energy would be lost

 

I think the main problem with the tower array system is the complex mechanism needed for each mirror to track the sun as it moves across the sky and focus it on the collector.
Noors 2 simplifies this by having a fixed point of focus for each mirror (on the pipe circulating hot oil) so they can be linked in rows with a single mechanism that only has to move in one plane.

 

No, it wouldn't. You have to use electricity or some other form of energy that you pay for, to heat the sand.

 

It's Australia if you need heat don't you just go outside?

 

Yes, that sounds highly plausible. While the site looks cool, the control of all of those mirrors has got to be a nightmare.

 

It's a country roughly the same size as the lower 48 but the population smaller than Texas so I think to an American it would seem mostly empty. Isn't the center of the continent pretty much wasteland?

You're not out of gas station or charging centers and the people that operated them would have to be not a thousand miles away so it doesn't sound like Australia is even set up for that kind of thing

 

you're so right, if they did not do that, I would have to hope someone had some other form of energy I could pay for that was not lost

 

Yeah - usually for melting the flip flops off your feet at the beach

 

Thanks for starting this thread but I thought that the Persians were the first people to invent a battery:


"Top 10 Inventions and Discoveries of Persian Civilization"
https://www.ancienthistorylists.com/mesopotamia-history/top-10-inventions-of-persian-civilizations/




EXCERPT "A ceramic pot, a metal tube, and a rod of a different metal were used to create the Baghdad Battery or Parthian Battery. The artifacts were found in Mahoze, or modern-day Khujut Rabu. The battery was tested by Western scientists who found that when the battery jar was filled with vinegar (or another electrolyte), it generated a current of 1.5 to 2.0 volts.

Wilhelm Konig, assistant at the National Museum of Iraq in the 1930s, authored a paper which proposed that the artifacts may have formed galvanic cells used for electroplating gold onto silver objects. This hypothesis has since been rejected and the true purpose of the artifacts remains unclear. If the artifacts were used as batteries in Persia, this would predate the discovery of the battery by Count Alessandro Volta by more than 1,600 years." CONTINUED

 

Keeping the mirrors clean of sand is the other issue effecting efficiency.
Again straight rows of uniform mirrors simplifies the automation of cleaning the mirrors.
The beauty of doing this sort of thing is you can use land poor or useless for farming and export the energy to where it is needed.
The Noors complex in Morocco is heavily funded by the EU to the tune of several hundred million dollars and a lot of the power is exported to Europe.
Growing crops for synthetic fuels or covering good farmland in Europe with solar farms is a backwards step in comparison.

 

Potentially so, but I just want to point out that it is very inefficient to be converting electric power into heat and then trying to reconvert that heat back into electric power.
(conversion of electric power into heat can easily be done with 100% conversion efficiency. Trying to change it back and capture a high percentage of the energy you put in is the problematic part)

If they have some way of using the sun directly to heat that sand, that might be much more practical, but it is also going to make the design more complicated.

If you were imagining this energy coming from solar panels or wind, I think you are deluded or very ignorant about the engineering specifications.

 

The true source of the energy is always the catch. This is just a method of storing energy.

That is why electric cars don't help nearly as much as many would hope. Much of the power used to charge electric cars comes from coal plants. The problem is only moved from the car engine to the coal plant. We do get efficiency improvements but not a lot.