News hardware Lithium batteries are over! The energy of the future will be stored in sand
Published on 07/07/2022 at 17:55
Lithium batteries are too has-been! In full ecological transition, the Finnish company Polar Night Energy has theorized and developed a new technology to store energy. Obviously, sand could be tomorrow’s main resource for our batteries.
An environmentally friendly way to store energy
Finland seems to be one step ahead of us. With the latest IPCC reports announcing catastrophic results with regard to our ecological transition policies, companies had to put in place solutions for the world of tomorrow.
According to BBC journalists who have had the chance to visit Polar Night Energy’s infrastructure, the installation planned by this company could well be the energy storage of the future, and all this at a lower cost.
Where we still use rare metals to conserve our energy, the company taps into the most available resources to create a complex capable of heating sand in silos in order to store the energy as well as possible.
Indeed, one of the major concerns of current methods for creating energy lies in storage. When using wind turbines or solar panels, energy is only available within a certain period of time. To overcome this concern, Polar Night Energy proposes to store all this in large sand silos.
These silos measure no less than 7 meters and keep the sand at a temperature of 500°C. The advantage is obvious: no use of precious (and expensive) materials to install them all over the world, and without waste.
For the moment, the Finnish company can distribute 8 megawatts per hour, but could soon push to 20 gigawatts per hour. To give you an idea, 1 gigawatt per hour can power around 300,000 homes.
What solutions for the world of tomorrow?
With research progressing on the side of Polar Night Energy, the latter was able to install silos in the town of Kankaanpää, in western Finland.
It is easy to imagine that other companies will follow suit if the Finnish company’s research bears fruit.
As a reminder, the report of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) announced on April 4 that the French government should make an effort on the ecological transitionby putting back on the table the elements discussed at the creation of the Paris Agreement, in 2015.
The use of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas must be replaced by low-carbon energy sources, such as hydroelectricity, photovoltaics, or even wind energy.
However, no law has been considered for our government, only projects have been mentioned following this report.
With the growing number of companies working in the field, we imagine, and we hope that our future will make us discover alternative sources of renewable energies, but also, of the storage of the latter.