This Sand Battery Is An Audacious Attempt To Store Green Power

While renewable energy comes with clear benefits, there are also some pretty major downsides. You can burn gas, coal, or harness the power of the atom 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. This means the energy generated from these sources is both constant and reliable. On the other hand, the wind doesn’t always blow, and the sun doesn’t always shine. So if you want constant power from these sources alone, you need to find a way to store the energy you harvest when the conditions are ideal.

Again, this may be a larger problem in places like Finland. On the equator, days are of a fairly equal length all year round. The further north or south you get, the more things change with the season. Some parts of Finland will get constant sunlight for several months during the summer — in fact, Visit Finland claims that when you’re in the Arctic Circle, the sun won’t set at all between May and August. While that doesn’t mean you get 24 hours of peak solar generating conditions, you will be able to generate some power constantly during those months. To balance this out, there are a few months of total darkness in winter where the sun won’t rise at all. Wind-based power systems are even less predictable, you get windy periods and you’ll get times where there’s barely a breeze.

So what you need is a way to store that energy. Most batteries use lithium, which is expensive and quite limited in what it can store. This means a cheap, easy, way of storing excess renewable energy is a game-changer when it comes to the practicality of climate-friendly power.