As global energy demand accelerates, one truth remains underappreciated: heat is the largest end use of energy. Today, more than 50 percent of global final energy consumption is dedicated to ...

Haley Mast is a freelance writer, fact-checker, and small organic farmer in the Columbia River Gorge. She enjoys gardening, reporting on environmental topics, and spending her time outside ...

Batteries are the key to the future of the most abundant sources of renewable energy, solar and wind power for one obvious reason: intermittence. If power generators want to replace fossil fuels ...

Polar Night Energy, which specializes in the design and manufacture of high-temperature thermal energy storage systems, has begun construction of a 250MWh 'sand battery' in Vaakus, southern Finland, ...

It doesn’t look like much, but Finland recently flipped the switch on the world’s largest sand-based battery. Yes, sand. A sand battery is a type of thermal energy storage system that uses sand or ...

A research group from Ghana has developed a solar PV-powered steam cooker (ISESC) with sand-based thermal energy storage (TES). “The potential of sand, given its thermal stability and low cost, has ...

A Finnish-Swedish consortium has designed a hybrid system that uses photovoltaics and solar thermal energy separately to provide steam to industrial facilities. The PV unit is coupled to a sand-based ...

For more than a century, fossil fuel companies have drilled oil and gas wells to increase the production, consumption, and export of fossil fuels. These wells are often abandoned once they are no ...

When you think of energy solutions, you might not imagine 100 tonnes of builders’ sand piled inside a huge silo. But one company has actually found that sand can be the secret sauce to energy storage, ...

Polar Night Energy’s heat storage system is a 23-foot-tall steel container filled with 100 tons of sand. (Polar Night Energy uses the lowest grade of sand that isn’t used in construction.) Hot air ...

Finland has inaugurated an industrial-scale sand battery this week in the southern town of Pornainen, where it'll take over heating duties from an old woodchip power plant for the municipality. It's ...