Large-scale ‘sand battery’ goes online in Finland

Re:Large-scale ‘sand battery’ goes online in Finland by Swizec on Wednesday July 06, 2022 @06:16PM (#32007537)

My hometown has a power plant in city center. During winter it uses the entire downtown area as a heat sink. It's great. Power plant gets cooling for its hot water, city residents get cheap heating for their homes.

Best part is you don't even care about heat loss because you're trying to get rid of all that heat anyway.

This scheme has been inplace since the 60's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ljubljana_Power_Station

District Heating is quite popular in much of the world. USA built the first such system back in 1853. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating

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Re:Large-scale ‘sand battery’ goes online in Finland by teruakohatu on Wednesday July 06, 2022 @06:30PM (#32007692)

Given how much health problems are caused by coal power plants, not sure it is that great to live near one.

But if you have to have coal, it makes good sense to harvest the energy rather than wastefully pumping the steam into cooling towers.

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Re:Large-scale ‘sand battery’ goes online in Finland by Swizec on Wednesday July 06, 2022 @06:59PM (#32007940)

I mean it’s already there and has been for 60 years. I’m sure its polution pales in comparison to the 200,000+ cars driving in the area daily.

Back when the coal power plant was built it was pretty normal to live near coal burning things.

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Re:Large-scale ‘sand battery’ goes online in Finland by stephen_g on Wednesday July 06, 2022 @11:16PM (#32009558)

Unless it has a lot of flue scrubbing, it's likely to be far, far worse than 200,000 reasonably modern cars in terms of things like fine particulate matter emissions, NOx and SOx emissions, etc. which are the real bad ones for health issues.

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