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.
Comment on The Power of Sand Batteries -- Revolutionizing Energy Storage... - YouTube
teft@lemmy.world 1 month agoThe 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 commercislly viable.
girsaysdoom@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al 1 month ago
The video shows a commercial application with +60% RTE.
LordKitsuna@lemmy.world 1 month ago
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