this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2024
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World’s largest thermal energy storage to be built in Vantaa, Finland (www.vantaanenergia.fi)
submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 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