Finnland baut die größte Sandbatterie der Welt. Der Standort kann Energie einen ganzen Monat lang kostengünstig speichern. Es werden keine „Seltenen Erden“ oder kritischen Materialien verwendet. Geschätzter Wert: 25 $/KWh
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/25/finland-sand-battery-renewable-energy-storage.html
21 Kommentare
This new facility can hold 100 MWh for about a month in summer and a week in winter. That’s enough for the town of 5000 local residents.
TechCrunch estimates the Finnish battery’s costs are under $25 per kilowatt-hour, compared to around $115 for leading lithium-ion batteries.
90% efficiency.
It doesn’t use any „rare earths“ or critical materials. Instead using locally sourced, recyclable materials.
Units are scalable and modular to fit different needs and uses. Suits small towns (like the current facility) and large scale industrial uses.
13 meters tall and 15 meters wide.
Independent of geography. No supply issues due to any geo-political problems.
Designed to store energy when it’s cheap and plentiful and supply when it’s expensive.
https://www.energymarketprice.com/home/en/news/1173922
https://polarnightenergy.com/sand-battery/
With the caveat that it is only a „thermal energy storage system“, not electricity.
>That’s enough to provide the 5,000 residents of Pornainen with nearly one month of heat demand through the summer — and roughly one week of demand in the winter.
This is a battery to distribute heat rather than to distribute electricity. Definitely makes sense if you already have a local heat network. You heat up the sand with electricity when the electricity is cheap, and then use that heat to run the local heat distribution network as you need it.
Dodgy maths here. They measure efficiently as heat in VS useful heat out. So something like a battery hooked up to a heat pump would be like 300% efficient VS the 90% of this sand battery. Static energy starter batteries also don’t use rare earths.
If this were scaled up to global usage, would there be enough sand?
Why is thermal storage always framed in competition to an electrochemical battery?!
Edit – there is no need to mention „rare earths“ in a thermal storage unit – this is NOT a direct replacement for an electric battery, and only has about 10% of the effective usefulness. Point being – it is framed as an alternative, and it is not. My comment has nothing about the Units of measurement – I said nothing about measurement of power.
*I don’t like sand. It’s coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere. Not like here. Here everything is soft and smooth*
The $25 per kWh likely is only the storage cost for the kWh that leaves the system, not accounting for the extra 50% or more kWh you needed to put into it.
The 90% round trip efficiency likely is the electricity + heat recovered, not the electrical round trip efficiency.
This is a typical PR stunt omitting the facts. This is far from efficient and far from new. They carefully state energ storage(not electricity) but compare it to batteries omitting the fact this doesnt store electricity. Converting heat to electricity looses moat of the efficiency making this much worse than batteries in terms of efficiency.
Now, make it smaller, and figure out a way to turn both the hvac and water tank to use the same heat pump tech and attached the smaller version to it as the thermal battery that be store the heat of summer into it for use in the hot water tank. Then in winter, use it to store extra run time for heating air.
Over all would reduce cost by not needing two different units, and you can drop heating elements from the hot water tank. Making the water tank just a dummy heat exchanger. While all the rest can be use added to the heat pump system for both cooling and heating.
If it’s 25$ per KWh, then it’s 2.5mil $ for this 100 MWh unit that lasts a week in winter. That means for whole winter – let’s say 13 weeks, which is probably way too little for Finland – it would be 32mil $ for these 5000 inhabitants. That seems like a lot of money.
Will any old sand work, or is it a specialized sand? From what I understand, quality sand is hard to source for construction stuff?
Finland is kind of a special case considering energy. Electricity is generally cheap, but price during winters is very volatile, large chunk of energy is used for heating and pretty much every city has district heating. Sand batteries often make sense in Finland, because during cold periods electricity prices skyrocket while heat pump efficiency drops but in turn during warmer periods electricity is literally free
Please tell me that is$ 0.25 kw/h and not dollars
Per the article, this is a heat storage battery. The town has centralized heat. Thermal energy, not electric.
Converting this heat back to electricity would lose a lot of energy (although the lost energy would be still usable as heat). This tech is good for where a lot of the energy goes into heating and central heating is available. It is not what we would normally call a battery though.
Yeah but what if the sun goes down or the wind stops blowing?
This is pretty interesting technology. One of the biggest issues with renewables is the intermittent generation of solar and wind power, so anything that helps store energy and provide battery alternatives is a great idea moving forward.
Sandia national labs demo project. This one is powered by solar thermal. It used sand like particle called carbo- because it’s nice and black.
https://solarpaces.nlr.gov/project/generation-3-particle-pilot-plant-sandia
The US will soon bomb them for it, because how can you get rich off of such technology…
Can someone reverse the Anakin Padme meme where she tells him she found a new way to make a battery and he slowly realizes she’s using sand?