this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2024
104 points (100.0% liked)

Europe

8484 readers
1 users here now

News/Interesting Stories/Beautiful Pictures from Europe 🇪🇺

(Current banner: Thunder mountain, Germany, 🇩🇪 ) Feel free to post submissions for banner pictures

Rules

(This list is obviously incomplete, but it will get expanded when necessary)

  1. Be nice to each other (e.g. No direct insults against each other);
  2. No racism, antisemitism, dehumanisation of minorities or glorification of National Socialism allowed;
  3. No posts linking to mis-information funded by foreign states or billionaires.

Also check out [email protected]

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
104
World’s largest thermal energy storage to be built in Vantaa, Finland (www.vantaanenergia.fi)
submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
27 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

A seasonal thermal energy storage will be built in Vantaa, which is Finland’s fourth largest city neighboring the capital of Helsinki.

The total thermal capacity of the fully charged seasonal thermal energy storage is 90 gigawatt-hours. This capacity could heat a medium-sized Finnish city for as long as a year. Broken down into smaller energy units, this amount of energy is equivalent to, for example, 1.3 million electric car batteries.

The project cost is estimated to be around 200 million euros, and it has already been awarded a 19-million-euro investment grant from Finland’s Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment. Construction of the storage facility’s entrance is expected to start in summer 2024. The seasonal thermal energy storage facility could be operational in 2028.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

There is a difference between electricity and thermal energy.

I don't know the details, but it's highly likely that they are using waste heat from power generation or industrial processes here. They are not going to be using excess renewable energy.

To use excess wind or solar to generate thermal energy, you would need to invest in extra grid capacity, or electric energy storage (e.g. batteries, which are much more expensive) and either use heat pumps, or resistive elements, which would then require even more grid capacity.

And even if you would do all of that, you would only have excess renewable energy a few hundred hours per year, so it will not pay for itself