Heating cities with sand and water

LOL, "those of you still using the wrong calibration system"

This is the kind of stuff I like to hear about: using existing infrastructure to take advantage of renewables, without having to invent "magic tech". I'm also glad to hear that this kind of stuff is happening here in Finland, innovation in renewable energy is how we can stay relevant as a small country.

I know not all solutions to storing energy will be this simple, but sometimes it's amazing how "Just heat some sand" or "Just pump water up a hill" can cover a huge amount of the problem.

Britain made a good start with district heating by planning a heating grid powered by Battersea Power Station. As I understand it, when the Electricity Act of 1947 established the British Electricity Authority, that took over control of all existing power stations, they decided that selling heat was not in their remit, and decided that no future power stations would sell heat. But it was in their remit to promote the use of electric fires, electric radiators etc. this sounds clean and neat until you realise that they built power stations along the Thames in London using about 3 times the coal to supply electric heat than was required to produce the same heat in people's coal fires. The smoke from the power stations was a major contributer to the London smog, so they declared a smokeless zone, so people had to burn more electricity (or coal gas - but check out how much more coal that burned. The power stations (and the gasworks) were except from the smokeless zone rules! In my second year working in London, I was astonished by a smog in about February 1974, when my employer (Hawker Siddeley Aviation) closed the factory early and sent us home. Finding the traffic at a standstill, no chance of a bus coming any time soon, I walked home to Richmond. I remember worse smogs in Edinburgh before it went smokeless in 1958, but hadn't seen a smog since then. London still had Battersea, Chelsea, Kingston, and I don't know how many other power stations in the London Basin pouring out coal smoke. You could not see more than on car length ahead of you on the road. I could hear the blast of foghorns from ships about 12 miles downriver.

We had "city steam" when I was a kid in Lockport, N.Y. U.S.A. The steam plant (downtown) was about 1/2 mile from us and the steam pipes were connected to probably 200 or so houses and businesses. No 'furnace' in the basement, just clean and efficient steam heat.

Certainly seems the most hopeful of all the green solutions for keeping warm.

I must congratulate you Dave, you actually made it thru the pronunciation of our Finnish names! Most of Finnish cities and smaller towns have a district heating system using various heat sources. In the countryside, electric heating, heatpumps and firewood are used. We mostly have a nice 20-22 C indoor temperature regardless of the outdoor weather.

In Vienna (austria) they will installed a huge heat pump at the sewage treatment plant wich will produce enough heat to heat 300.000 homes.

In Minnesota I lived in a place with district heating and cooling and it was great. It was included in the rent which made for a nice cool summer. Would recommend.

Dave, Have you seen Kensa's quite sensible scheme for using a low temp district heating system? Essentially this uses a low temperature distribution system which doesn't need insulation or fancy pipes to distribute water at a very modest temperature around an urban network. Each house then has what amounts to a ground-source heat pump to boost the temperature to what is needed to heat that particular home. The heat pumps work with a very high COP, seeing as the temperature rise is very modest. The individual home owners retain control of their heating. What's not to like?

I'm actually working on a household heat storage device. Ceramic kiln filled with firebrick. Heat it when power is cheap, crack lid when power is Expensive.

Having invested in Ripple cooperative wind and solar generation schemes I would also be quite keen to invest in storage solutions like these 👍😀

I am, as ever, grateful for the professional information !

Poor Dave, he had his work cut out for him today. Even one or two of our Finnish words/names are an effort for English speakers but oh my you had a bumper crop of them in this video. 😂❤😂

At our household, we've gone all in on solar panels and electrifying our furnace, our hot water heater, one of our vehicles, all our landscaping tools, and our other appliances. Our solar panels provided 68% of our electricity for 2023. Some might say, oh well that proves that solar isn't enough. I say, hey, we're 68% there already. From total reliance on fossil carbon to 68% not relying on fossil carbon is a pretty good achievement. But yes, there's still this big hole in our dream of getting all our energy from the sun, the Cache Valley, Utah, winter. During winter, our furnace is ravenous for up to 50 kW-hrs a day at exactly the time our solar panels are producing between nothing and 10 kW-hr per day. We have 27 kW-hr of battery storage but that is a pittance of what we need. What we need is more like a 1 MW-hr battery. That might happen one day, but right now, an affordable 1 MW-hr electrical storage battery is not on the horizon. But wait. What if, instead of an electrical storage battery, we had a 1 MW-hr thermal storage battery we could draw upon during the winter? Bingo, that just might plug the hole of winter. I'm not sure it would pencil out, but it'd be worth running some numbers on it.

There is a hockey stadium complex where I live. The heat removed when making the ice is pumped to a nearby swimming pool where it is used for space heating, heating water in the swimming pool and heating water for showers. This is an application which can be adapted for other facilities such as cold storage warehouses where large amounts of heat are now just expelled into the atmosphere but instead be stored in a heat battery such as the one mentioned in the video. Another good application would be capturing the waste heat to heat greenhouses.😀

Smart of Findland to start concentrating on storage. They'll need all they can get when the AMOC stops.

Thanks for the new video! It's nice to see Polar Night making progress. Maybe Finland can be an example for the rest of us. District heating makes so much sense, it's just the efficiency you get from scaling things up.

Thanks. Sometimes it's good to have hope restored.

If you didn't know Vattenfall is ''waterfall'' in English, it comes from ''Royal Waterfall Board'' which was the Swedish state's electric power company (and still is)