For reference, this city is about as north as Anchorage Alaska and today they got less than 7 hours of sunlight and it'll continue to decrease for the next 3 weeks.
The Nordic countries generally still wants to increase their wind and solar power, but the big issue during winters is when there's cold air high pressure systems we get neither sun nor wind, having an energy storage that can hold up to 5 days worth of energy should help us nudge past them.
Hydro-energy exist (mainly Sweden and Norway, but I think some in Finland as well), but it's fairly built out so stable non-fossil power needs to be nuclear, or wind/sun + storage (that hasn't been good enough so far).
One of the interesting things about hydro is that it's usually constructed to satisfy baseload power. In reality, shifting that over to a peaking plant requires relatively modest changes to system, a small fraction of the cost of an entirely new dam. You don't actually need the "Pumped" part of pumped hydro, you can just throttle normal hydro on and off if you have enough turbines (though for ecological & geomorphological reasons some minor downstream damming also helps). There wasn't any reason to install the extra turbines in the age of fossil fuels. They only take ~30 seconds to spin up, versus days or weeks for thermal plants.
Imagine if we build hydro to full capacity and monetize the excess with data/compute centers and/or crypto mining. We'd have so much spare capacity for any residential or industrial purposes.
> “Hydro-energy exist, but it's fairly built out so stable non-fossil power needs to be nuclear, or wind/sun + storage”
Interconnectors also exist (and more are planned), which means, for example, that Norway can buy wind energy from the UK when it’s cheap and abundant, in preference to using stored energy from their hydro lakes.
That way they effectively get more out of existing hydro lakes, which in Norway is already a very significant storage capacity.
Theres not going to be built any more interconnectors from Norway anytime soon.
Electricity became a lot more expensive in Norway after building several interconnectors to UK and mainland Europe. Importing high prices from the failed energy politics of UK and Germany which both have among the most expensive electricity in the world.
This has been a huge debate, and the general concensus seems to be that joining ACER and building inrerconnectors to mainland Europe was a big mistake.
Even Southern England cannot get enough wind energy from Scotland to fully utilise wind farms because transmission capacity is insufficient. I would imagine a transmission line to Norway will be even more expensive than to England.
I think the point is that winter can create periods where there is neither adequate wind or adequate sun. Having strong wind production at some times will only be good if there's a way to store the excess. That's exactly what this project does and I believe that was GPs point.
Hydro energy generation is fairly built out, but the Nordics have lots of places suitable to build out hydro energy storage. Hydro generation requires a flow to dam, but storage doesn't.
We don't really. Hydro storage requires reservoirs where you can freely adjust the water level. Most of our lakes have shorelines that have been built out, and the property owners get really angry if you suggest frequently adjusting the water level significantly.
The largest planned hydro storage projects are using decommissioned mines, and those are going to run out quickly.
True, but that disrupts ecosystems. Or so the argument against go building storage dams go.
That said, there's been a fair bit of talk here in Norway recently about tax incentives blocking hydro owners from upgrading old generators, improving efficency. Apparently a lot of currently unused power available if they "just" did that.
> but it's fairly built out so stable non-fossil power needs to be nuclear,
Or just gas turbines running on decarbonized fuels. The backup for the "10 year winter" can be fossil fuels. It is such a minuscule problem that it does not matter in the slightest.
It is essentially the emergency reserve we are talking about, no point wasting tens of billions in subsidies per new built nuclear reactor.
Those "10 year" winters seems to appear every year with producers falling back to burning fossil fuels to keep the grid working.
Now part of that problem is that we more or less constantly export electricity to Germany (but that was because they closed their nuclear plants).
The main problem domestically in Sweden is that 30% of current electricity generation in Sweden is nuclear, but the _newest_ plants are 40 years old, on top of that the electricity generation needs to increase, steel mills de-carbonizing, more electric cars and so on.
I'm not ruling out Nuclear in general, but let's remember that:
* Energy can also be carried northward from other areas in the same country or neighboring countries, where there are more sunlight hours or more wind.
1. The southernmost spot in Finland is too far north, and the scramble that happened in EU at the loss of Russian energy supplies made it crystal clear that we can not trust any other country to help in times of need.
2. We have no geothermal sources sufficient for production of electricity, it can only be used to slightly reduce primary energy use during winter, but it will raise electricity use during winter.
3. Helps not at all, because 0 times however large number you like is still 0.
4. Likewise.
5. Improvements in efficiency do not help you stay alive when it's -30°C.
The option up here really truly is "do we use fossil fuels, or do we use nuclear". Renewables do not help. They are nice to have, and it makes sense to build them because they complement the reduced output of nuclear in summertime, and because the lower cost/kWh can help some industry, but that's all.
Right, the worst case scenario is cold temperatures, transmission problems (say days after a storm), lull, and nuclear and hydro power malfunction. However, it should be pointed out that winters are usually quite windy and there are only a few days per year you get very cold temperatures coupled with nearly no wind at all.
But "stable" isn't really want they want or need. They have a) cold, dark winters so they want more energy in the winter not a constant amount year round, b) hydro (89% of electricity in Norway!) that is already used as seasonal storage and can be varied to meet daily variation.
Cheap wind that produces more in winter is the obvious answer and indeed seems to be a focus of their build out.
> But "stable" isn't really want they want or need.
Yes, that is exactly what they need. They need stable energy over let's say a 1-2 week period. A windy week is often followed by a non-windy week. So if they can store the energy from the windy week and use it in the following week then they can rely on wind power as a stable energy source.
There's an interesting property to thermal storage, as a consequence of simple geometry. Consider a cube. volume = n³ and surface area = 6*n². Surface area increases more slowly than volume. The ratio of surface to volume decreases with more size. Thus: a sufficiently large thermal reservoir becomes self-insulating with its own mass.
It's even better than that. In addition to the factor of n from ratio of volume to surface area, there's also a factor of n from the increased thermal resistance of the mass of the storage volume (the temperature gradient from the surface to the center goes as 1/n). So, the thermal time constant of the object scales as n^2.
This very favorable scaling is why natural geothermal retains heat even though the input energy was delivered gradually over as much as millions of years.
I've always wondered why we don't build homes with a buried tank of water used as heat storage. In the summer it can be heated with solar thermal to around 90c, and in the winter heat can be drawn out and go through radiators or underfloor heating, with a mixer valve. You just need a few pumps and valves, not even a heat pump is needed.
If you assume a modern house with a heat load of 1800kWh per year (fairly standard for a new build medium sized home where I live, in Northern Europe) that means you'd need a tank roughly 50m3, or 10,000 gallons for Americans. In terms of insulation you'd need around 50cm of XPS foam, and it would be buried a meter below ground.
It's nothing terribly complicated in terms of construction or engineering. Of course you'd pay more upfront, but then your heating bills would be practically zero. In warmer climates it would be much simpler, you could probably get away without burying it.
Just as important here: The higher the temperature of the storage medium, the higher the fundamental limit to how much electric energy you can recover.
Put differently: If you used the same amount of energy to heat one bucket of sand by 200C (A) or two bucket of sands by 100C (B), you would be able to recover more electric energy from case A because of the fundamental Carnot Limit.
This is why sand is a good storage medium (as opposed to e.g. water), and why some solar power systems work with molten salts. Also why steam-based power plants need to operate at high pressure to be able to obtain high-temperature steam.
Yes and a freezer that is only a bit larger, taller or deeper has a lot more liters of storage. Not just because it's in 3D but also because a smaller freezer still needs big sides. So, a lot more liters but only a tiny bit more energy consumption.
ps: living in an area with a high price per square meter goes against this strategy unless you manage to share a freezer
You speak theoretically but metropolitan areas in these countries all have those pipes in place and in use for the better part of a century.
Using heat for heating has many redeeming qualities. Heat is high entropy and it is not a good idea to "waste" low entropy energy to create high entropy energy. Many industrial processes run on heat and waste heat is generated everywhere. The systems are also cheap to run once in place.
That's a real issue, but this is for a district heating system which already exists and already faces this issue. And yet the district heating system is presumably practical.
Changing to a different central source of heating (i.e. storage) seems orthogonal.
> [250MWh] held in a container 14m high and 15m wide
According to Gemini 3.0 Pro, lifepo4 is 1.5-3.5x more dense than this, which isn't bad. 250MWh is a lot of capacity for such a small land footprint. At 2MW it can power ~2000 homes for ~5 days while taking up the land footprint of ~1 home.
What's the price? And how does the price scale with capacity?
The problem seems to be heat quality - they don’t get electricity back, it’s only good for heating. (Which admittedly makes perfect sense in the winter near the North Pole.)
I was interested in trying to make a DIY thermal battery as a hobby experiment. Other than using thermal energy directly, I couldn't find a way to effectively convert the heat energy to electrical energy.
Peltier modules can be used to generate electricity, but they are crazy inefficient.
An efficient steam turbine is largely inaccessible to hobbiests and I am scared of steam/pressure. Though I did look at repurposing a car turbo for this purpose. There were additional issues with regulating the amount of heat you wanted to extract (load matching) and recycling waste heat.
I wondered if it was possible to use a Sterling engine, but you can't buy anything other than very small toys online and I don't have the facilities to machine my own.
Haha, would love to get something working, but I suppose I'm not smart enough to figure out an effective way to get that heat back out as usable/controlled electricity.
The answer in almost all electrical production boils down to spinning a turbine with steam (or wind). Nuclear does it, all the fossil fuels do it and ultimately heat batteries do it too. The alternative is photovoltaic or directly nuclear to electron production and then storage with chemical batteries or massive capacitors.
Most of our electrical production is based on a solution found several hundred years ago, we just made it really big and worked out how to control the heating and pressure of the steam well.
You missed thermoelectric generators that uses the Seebeck effect to generate a current between two temperature differentials. It's terribly inefficient, unfortunately.
> An efficient steam turbine is largely inaccessible to hobbiests and I am scared of steam/pressure.
Thermal electricity generation really benefits from scale and extremes. The Carnot efficiency is proportional to the temperature differential between hot and cold. Even so-called "low quality" heat from a standard nuclear rector design is far hotter than anybody should deal with at home and it only gets ~1/3 efficiency. And dealing with small turbines is really inefficient too.
This is where batteries and solar really shine. They scale so well, and are extremely economical and electrically efficient.
Heat storage works well when you get beyond the scale of individual homes, but it's hard to make it work. I'd love to see something related to heat pumps in the future for homes, but district heating, such as could be accomplished by converting natural gas systems to heat delivery, are probably required for it to make sense.
Yeah, sadly, it seems almost impossible to get anything higher than 30% efficiency (theoretically with a Stirling engine, if you can find one, haha) out of a thermal battery without extreme pressures and temperatures.
Back-of-the-napkin math felt promising. A 1kg block of sand heated to 500 degrees Celsius should contain about 100Wh of electricity. Scaling that capacity up is easy, as it's just about adding sand or temperature (+ an effective method of transporting heat across the sand - maybe sand + used motor oil?).
Assuming 80% efficiency, tariff arbitrage (buy electricity during off-peak hours and use it during high-price hours) would pay off very quickly. In my area (Australia) it would be a matter of months - but the low real-world efficiency and lack of parts make it impossible.
It could work for heating during winter, though perhaps an AC/heatpump with the condenser a couple metres underground would be better value for money.
Heat storage can work for individual homes on the shorter scale. If you heat your home with in-floor heating (lower temperature requirements) you can have ~1-2m3 buffer tank that you heat up during the night and then use the stored heat during the day to heat your home. Works very well.
This project is for district heating, not producing electricity.
In general it is true that low-grade heat is difficult to convert to electricity, and there isn't any existing mass-market device that does it. You'll have to make your own, which involves learning to machine and responding to your perfectly reasonable fear of steam and pressure with proven safety measures.
In the articles case the end use of energy is household heating, so there is no need to convert back to electricity. The whole beauty of thermal energy storage that the end use of energy in many use cases is.. heat: heating buildings, cooking, industrial heating (from food processing to iron smelting), producing steam, etc.
Every couple of years I look around to see if anyone is selling sterling cycle engines in the 5-10 hp range, I always find a couple neat projects but nowhere can you just buy an engine.
I assume that because there is no current market for small sterling generators nobody wants invest in tooling to make one and because there are no small sterling generators there is no market for them.
If you need to use heating in a cold climate, you could use your stored energy to heat the radiator of a heat pump, which would then be drastically more efficient than using normal air on the radiator.
There's a video of people doing this on YouTube. They use the ground as their heat source. https://youtu.be/s-41UF02vrU
LFP is so cheap that small-scale thermal battery makes not sense for electricity generation. Even in big scale (like OP) it mostly makes sense for heat, e.g. district heating systems, industry process heat, etc.
Why do so many people do "why didn't you..." As if the engineers who designed this didn't have 1002 alternatives and went with this one for reasons of budget, politics, prior knowledge, IPR costs, skills, religious beliefs, or a million other reasons.
Why did we go to the moon when we have perfectly good vacuum chambers here at home.
The implied "my way is better" in these responses is usually the bad take on "what made this better than my way" as a question which nobody really can answer unless the OP is the engineer.
"Why does Finland not deploy ubiquitous small nuclear reactors every 25 meters and make a heated road to the north you can drive over as well as get power from if you have a power adapter for finnish plugs"
In a cold climate, I would expect burying it to use the ground as a natural insulator. Why was an above ground design chosen?
Specifically, does the need for heavy insulation and the active heating of the sand make the ground a less effective or even problematic insulator? Could excavating and building a below-ground foundation for a high-temperature device like this be more complex and expensive than an above-ground silo? How would permafrost conditions affect this design?
Because digging is expensive and there's plenty of land. More efficient to use the budget to build a bigger structure than to build a smaller one and dig down. Bigger structure also gives you better insulation (surface area compared to volume decreases non-linearly with increased volume).
I was surprised too at the 2nd sentence: "The project will have a heating power of 2MW and a thermal energy storage (TES) capacity of 250MW..."
and how a news outlet about energy could get such a fundamental unit wrong.
But given that later in the article it does revert to correct units (and the numbers are plausibly proportional), I assume it's just a typo. Strange that it hasn't been corrected even now.
"...It follows Polar Night Energy completing and putting a 1MW/100MWh Sand Battery TES project into commercial operations this summer..."
Interesting. Does anyone know what source of electricity is going to be used for this ? Probably solar but it might be also useful with coal plants or wind farms that produce even when there is not enough demand.
How are they moving the heat ?
Wind in practice. There's only few hours of sunlight in the winter during the day. There has been a surge of electric boiler buildup by district heating companies in the last few years to exploit the periods of high wind and resulting very low electricity prices.
Heat is transferred using disctrict heating networks where 65-120 C water is circulated.
No, these generally use excess power during the night and windy days to store heat.
There's not that much CHP production that there'd be excess, plus they can adjust those plants well enough that there's no unnecessary burning going on.
Most likely not solar since there’s almost no solar during the winter months. Sun comes up at 0900 and goes down at 1500 in the south. In the north it’s worse.
It's currently noon in Finland and solar accounts for 6 MW in the grid. That's about 0.05% of the total production. Nuclear is 3863 MW (~31%) and wind is 6281 MW (~50%).
What might be plentiful is wind, especially during the nights.
> "The installation will supply heat to the Vääksy district heating network and is expected to lower fossil-based emissions by approximately 60% annually, primarily through an estimated 80% reduction in natural gas consumption and reduced reliance on wood chips."
Those are the energy sources they're replacing with this tech - according to <https://reneweconomy.com.au/new-worlds-largest-sand-battery-...> it's surplus energy from renewables that will 'charge' the battery (so likely wind, hydro and solar that is produced but surplus to the grid's requirements)
These are interesting, but the cost per kWh of storage capacity is still probably too high for true seasonal storage. Short term storage runs into competition with batteries.
I point again to Standard Thermal for an idea tailored to true seasonal storage. I wait for more news from them, particularly on their very low cost resistive heater technology.
Doesn't need to be seasonal, we have enough energy in general to go through winter. This is to help through week long cold snaps, when Finland is short on energy. Week-long storage is still eyewateringly expensive with chemical batteries.
Also the capex from sand battery goes to (mostly) local construction, while when buying chemical batteries all the money goes to china.
The big question is how much it will cost. For comparison I believe there is a heat battery in Germany using (atmospheric pressure) liquid water (98 C), 50M EUR for perhaps 20x the thermal storage capacity (versus 20 C water).
The use of sand, presumably heated to a much higher temperature than the boiling point of water, seems overkill for district heating (unless peak heat demand requires flow temperatures above 100 C). But it does reduce the volume of sand required, so the size of the storage system.
The cost is a function of the size and mass. So, more heat capacity and less mass means lower cost per mwh.
These things are extremely simple and fairly efficient. It's resistive heating (wires and spools) of a thermal mass (sand/stone) in some kind of container (a simple silo) with a lot of insulation and some pipes to heat up water. Higher temperatures mean getting the heat out is easier and that the battery will work for longer. Basically until the temperature drops below the required temperature.
There's pipework for circulating air inside it when they want to charge/discharge it, but yes, essentially it's mostly tons of sand.
They have resistors for charging it with electricity (resistors heat the air, air is circulated in the pipes which heats the sand) when the electricity price is cheap, and then for discharging they have a air-water heat exchanger so they can pump the heat energy into the district heating network.
You use electricity (ideally cheap solar/wind) to heat air. That hot air circulates through a silo full of sand. The sand holds the heat for months. Later the heat is drawn out and used for buildings or industrial processes.
I do kind of wonder will those come back, with a slightly smarter heuristic for turning on than "it is night". They're inefficient next to a heat pump, but vastly cheaper to make and install, so with a smarter grid, they may be an appropriate sink for excess solar/wind in times of overproduction.
There wasn't much about the energy equation there. And since it's just conversation with Gemini just pasted here, I'm not sure how much to trust it and it just feels lazy and disjointed.
- embrace North Africa, admitting them as member states, and doing massive solar there, and doing massive grid expansion to carry it north. And then in top of that, will their way to sufficient storage like the rest of us.
EU does have trouble with solar seasonality, but wind is seasonally anti-correlated with solar, and the geospatial correlation between different wind turbines drops off more than linearly with distance, and the EU covers a very large land mass as-is. You can also over-build solar inside Europe to have reasonable collection during winter.
I also see no reason to admit North African states into the EU before an agreement can be reached about transporting solar. The geopolitical risks have always been about other states severing the link during a conflict with you, and less about the parties to the deal reneging. So whether Morocco or Algeria is part of the EU is quite immaterial to the risk profile.
This kind of thing really does need simulation modelling to be reasoned about properly. The one thing I am confident in saying is that these single sentence just-so stories about what is and isn't a good idea are going to be wrong, because the fundamental principle is statistical diversification, which needs to be approached through simulation rather than through words.
It's helpful to have two flavors of storage; one short term and efficient (batteries), one long term with low capex (hydrogen, thermal). The last is the most undeveloped but there are promising ideas.
Why do you say "embrace nuclear" when the EU has substantial existing and planned nuclear plants? (Current gen is something like 24% nuclear in EU, 20% in wider Europe, 18% USA, 4.4% China)
And anyway, alongside that world leading nuclear already in existence why wouldn't they just install lots of cheap solar and wind, and heat pumps and EVs and reduce their imports of energy from their current high levels (about .6 Trillion euros in 2022, down to .35 in 2024 though that seems mostly a change in price, volume has declined only slightly)
Finland's current energy equation according to Google Gemini:
Is Finland importing household garbage from Italy and why?
Gemini: ... In summary, Finland imports waste (mainly as pre-processed fuel) to feed its modern waste-to-energy plants, which are a key part of its heating and energy strategy, especially as domestic residual waste volumes decrease due to better recycling and as a replacement for former Russian renewable fuel imports.
Why you call it "processed"? It is raw garbage in huge mounds smelling bad and harboring flies and rats?
Gemini: ... This processing turns smelly, inconsistent "garbage" into a stable, high-quality, non-hazardous secondary fuel that is compliant with strict EU waste shipment and energy production regulations. The whole point of the import is to fuel power plants efficiently, which requires this specific, processed product.
Lets try again. Why the "processed" mound of garbage from Italy smells bad and houses flies and rats?
Gemini: ... Sometimes ....
This is not "sometimes", it makes living near Loviisa harbour impossible.
Gemini: ... It is clear that the environmental integrity and quality of life for residents of Loviisa have been compromised by the need to fuel Finland's waste-to-energy capacity with large, sometimes substandard, imports.
etc etc.
===
Short summary: The Pro-Russian Green "Pedophile"-Party destroyed the existing energy infrastructure which ran on coal from Poland etc.
A new system was built to use "renewable" Russian gas and Russian wood industry leftovers.
The situation is desperate; any shit from anywhere at any cost is better than using local renewable biomass, such as peat.
Finland has enormous amounts of peat, which is worth more than Norway's oil reserves.
Calling Green Party "Pro Russian" is ridiculous. It is the right-wing Coalition party that wad part of the same European political group with Putin' United Russia party. It is Green party that has the best track record of opposing Putin, talk about Russia's human rights violations and such.
Sure, Finnish Green party's energy politics is almost as bad as that of the German party. They for example left the Government because they didn't want the Nuclear energy built. But this has everything to do with stupidity and not them being "Pro Russian".
Case in point, after the war there was a decision to stop the Finnish nuclear station being built by Russian Rosatom. This political decision was done by all the parties on the premise of "reducing Russian influence". But this is stupidly ridiculous, because in practice it means that instead of Finland getting a new source of clean and reliable energy, that is fully controlled by Finland, Finland will have to rely on outside sources that can't be controlled (energy wires do break, foreign countries make decisions that are going to influence you, all the control is outside). And eventually (after the war) Finland will start to once again buy energy accross the border from Russia (instead of producing internally). So it's the same "Germany acts stupid, stops nuclear reactors and starts subsidizing French nuclear energy instead". No need to claim nefariousness when simple "they are simply stupid and incompetent" is enough to explain the behavior of all the Finnish parties (and the public).
Hey @grok. Is there some grounds to call the Green Party a Pedophile Party?
Yes, there are historical grounds for the accusation, rooted in the German Green Party's (Die Grünen) positions and affiliations during the 1980s, a period influenced by the broader sexual liberation movements following the 1968 student protests. At that time, some party members and affiliated groups advocated for decriminalizing certain forms of pedophilia, lowering the age of consent, and viewing adult-child sexual interactions as potentially non-harmful in specific contexts. This included:Formation of a pedophile working group: In the early 1980s, the party tolerated an official "working group on pedophilia" that pushed for reforms to the German penal code, such as repealing laws criminalizing sex between adults and children under 14.
dw.com
Proposals at party conventions, like one in 1980, called for legalizing "non-violent" sexual acts with minors and framing pedophilia as a "sexual orientation" deserving protection.
spiegel.de
Key figures and statements: Prominent members, including future European Parliament leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit, made controversial remarks; in a 1982 TV appearance, he described playful sexual interactions with young children as an "erotic-manic game" based on his experiences as a kindergarten teacher.
dw.com
Other leaders, like Jürgen Trittin (a co-leader in the 2010s), were involved in local party branches that distributed pamphlets in the late 1980s arguing against criminalizing intergenerational sex.
spiegel.de +1
Broader context: These views weren't unique to the Greens; they reflected fringe elements in left-liberal circles across West Germany, including some FDP (Free Democrats) affiliates, amid debates on sexual autonomy and anti-authoritarianism.
For reference, this city is about as north as Anchorage Alaska and today they got less than 7 hours of sunlight and it'll continue to decrease for the next 3 weeks.
The Nordic countries generally still wants to increase their wind and solar power, but the big issue during winters is when there's cold air high pressure systems we get neither sun nor wind, having an energy storage that can hold up to 5 days worth of energy should help us nudge past them.
Hydro-energy exist (mainly Sweden and Norway, but I think some in Finland as well), but it's fairly built out so stable non-fossil power needs to be nuclear, or wind/sun + storage (that hasn't been good enough so far).
One of the interesting things about hydro is that it's usually constructed to satisfy baseload power. In reality, shifting that over to a peaking plant requires relatively modest changes to system, a small fraction of the cost of an entirely new dam. You don't actually need the "Pumped" part of pumped hydro, you can just throttle normal hydro on and off if you have enough turbines (though for ecological & geomorphological reasons some minor downstream damming also helps). There wasn't any reason to install the extra turbines in the age of fossil fuels. They only take ~30 seconds to spin up, versus days or weeks for thermal plants.
Imagine if we build hydro to full capacity and monetize the excess with data/compute centers and/or crypto mining. We'd have so much spare capacity for any residential or industrial purposes.
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> “Hydro-energy exist, but it's fairly built out so stable non-fossil power needs to be nuclear, or wind/sun + storage”
Interconnectors also exist (and more are planned), which means, for example, that Norway can buy wind energy from the UK when it’s cheap and abundant, in preference to using stored energy from their hydro lakes.
That way they effectively get more out of existing hydro lakes, which in Norway is already a very significant storage capacity.
Theres not going to be built any more interconnectors from Norway anytime soon.
Electricity became a lot more expensive in Norway after building several interconnectors to UK and mainland Europe. Importing high prices from the failed energy politics of UK and Germany which both have among the most expensive electricity in the world.
This has been a huge debate, and the general concensus seems to be that joining ACER and building inrerconnectors to mainland Europe was a big mistake.
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> Norway can buy wind energy from the UK
Even Southern England cannot get enough wind energy from Scotland to fully utilise wind farms because transmission capacity is insufficient. I would imagine a transmission line to Norway will be even more expensive than to England.
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> the big issue during winters is when there's cold air high pressure systems we get neither sun nor wind
Wind does better in the winter.
See eg here for Canada monthly stats: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=251000...
Also, wind does better at night than day, which may be related or not.
I think the point is that winter can create periods where there is neither adequate wind or adequate sun. Having strong wind production at some times will only be good if there's a way to store the excess. That's exactly what this project does and I believe that was GPs point.
And in Finland: 60% of Finnish wind energy 'collected' in the winter months (Oct-Mar)
https://suomenuusiutuvat.fi/en/wind-power/wind-power-in-cold...
> there's cold air high pressure systems we get neither sun nor wind
AKA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute
Hydro energy generation is fairly built out, but the Nordics have lots of places suitable to build out hydro energy storage. Hydro generation requires a flow to dam, but storage doesn't.
We don't really. Hydro storage requires reservoirs where you can freely adjust the water level. Most of our lakes have shorelines that have been built out, and the property owners get really angry if you suggest frequently adjusting the water level significantly.
The largest planned hydro storage projects are using decommissioned mines, and those are going to run out quickly.
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True, but that disrupts ecosystems. Or so the argument against go building storage dams go.
That said, there's been a fair bit of talk here in Norway recently about tax incentives blocking hydro owners from upgrading old generators, improving efficency. Apparently a lot of currently unused power available if they "just" did that.
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Hydro doesn't work so well when things freeze over. Geothermal on the other hand...
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That hydro is regularly turned off when it gets too cold.
Really? How do they turn it off? Where can I read about it?
I often pass the hydro bridge, so we have winters and whatnot - I didn't know they turn them off.
I can see hydro pumping power for all year long and being the top source of electricity in Latvia: https://www.ast.lv/en/electricity-market-review?year=2025&mo...
> but it's fairly built out so stable non-fossil power needs to be nuclear,
Or just gas turbines running on decarbonized fuels. The backup for the "10 year winter" can be fossil fuels. It is such a minuscule problem that it does not matter in the slightest.
It is essentially the emergency reserve we are talking about, no point wasting tens of billions in subsidies per new built nuclear reactor.
Those "10 year" winters seems to appear every year with producers falling back to burning fossil fuels to keep the grid working.
Now part of that problem is that we more or less constantly export electricity to Germany (but that was because they closed their nuclear plants).
The main problem domestically in Sweden is that 30% of current electricity generation in Sweden is nuclear, but the _newest_ plants are 40 years old, on top of that the electricity generation needs to increase, steel mills de-carbonizing, more electric cars and so on.
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invest in saving/harvesting energy. Better than producing when solar is cheap as hell and you get no-solar-harvesting because of your location
I'm not ruling out Nuclear in general, but let's remember that:
* Energy can also be carried northward from other areas in the same country or neighboring countries, where there are more sunlight hours or more wind.
* Geothermal energy sources, e.g. https://www.rehva.eu/rehva-journal/chapter/geothermal-energy...
* Increase in solar panel farm area
* Improvements in panel efficiency (which continue)
* Improvement in energy use efficiency
... in some combination, and with decent storage, might get even the Nordic countries to cover their needs.
1. The southernmost spot in Finland is too far north, and the scramble that happened in EU at the loss of Russian energy supplies made it crystal clear that we can not trust any other country to help in times of need.
2. We have no geothermal sources sufficient for production of electricity, it can only be used to slightly reduce primary energy use during winter, but it will raise electricity use during winter.
3. Helps not at all, because 0 times however large number you like is still 0.
4. Likewise.
5. Improvements in efficiency do not help you stay alive when it's -30°C.
The option up here really truly is "do we use fossil fuels, or do we use nuclear". Renewables do not help. They are nice to have, and it makes sense to build them because they complement the reduced output of nuclear in summertime, and because the lower cost/kWh can help some industry, but that's all.
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Right, the worst case scenario is cold temperatures, transmission problems (say days after a storm), lull, and nuclear and hydro power malfunction. However, it should be pointed out that winters are usually quite windy and there are only a few days per year you get very cold temperatures coupled with nearly no wind at all.
"there are only a few days per year you get very cold temperatures coupled with nearly no wind at all"
This is a terrible handwave. How many days per year, in the middle of winter, in a cold country, are you OK with having no power?
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But "stable" isn't really want they want or need. They have a) cold, dark winters so they want more energy in the winter not a constant amount year round, b) hydro (89% of electricity in Norway!) that is already used as seasonal storage and can be varied to meet daily variation.
Cheap wind that produces more in winter is the obvious answer and indeed seems to be a focus of their build out.
> But "stable" isn't really want they want or need.
Yes, that is exactly what they need. They need stable energy over let's say a 1-2 week period. A windy week is often followed by a non-windy week. So if they can store the energy from the windy week and use it in the following week then they can rely on wind power as a stable energy source.
There's an interesting property to thermal storage, as a consequence of simple geometry. Consider a cube. volume = n³ and surface area = 6*n². Surface area increases more slowly than volume. The ratio of surface to volume decreases with more size. Thus: a sufficiently large thermal reservoir becomes self-insulating with its own mass.
It's even better than that. In addition to the factor of n from ratio of volume to surface area, there's also a factor of n from the increased thermal resistance of the mass of the storage volume (the temperature gradient from the surface to the center goes as 1/n). So, the thermal time constant of the object scales as n^2.
This very favorable scaling is why natural geothermal retains heat even though the input energy was delivered gradually over as much as millions of years.
I've always wondered why we don't build homes with a buried tank of water used as heat storage. In the summer it can be heated with solar thermal to around 90c, and in the winter heat can be drawn out and go through radiators or underfloor heating, with a mixer valve. You just need a few pumps and valves, not even a heat pump is needed.
If you assume a modern house with a heat load of 1800kWh per year (fairly standard for a new build medium sized home where I live, in Northern Europe) that means you'd need a tank roughly 50m3, or 10,000 gallons for Americans. In terms of insulation you'd need around 50cm of XPS foam, and it would be buried a meter below ground.
It's nothing terribly complicated in terms of construction or engineering. Of course you'd pay more upfront, but then your heating bills would be practically zero. In warmer climates it would be much simpler, you could probably get away without burying it.
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Billions, mostly.
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Just as important here: The higher the temperature of the storage medium, the higher the fundamental limit to how much electric energy you can recover.
Put differently: If you used the same amount of energy to heat one bucket of sand by 200C (A) or two bucket of sands by 100C (B), you would be able to recover more electric energy from case A because of the fundamental Carnot Limit. This is why sand is a good storage medium (as opposed to e.g. water), and why some solar power systems work with molten salts. Also why steam-based power plants need to operate at high pressure to be able to obtain high-temperature steam.
I'm pretty sure this is intended to store and produce heat anyway. They aren't going to be using this for generating electricity.
Yes and a freezer that is only a bit larger, taller or deeper has a lot more liters of storage. Not just because it's in 3D but also because a smaller freezer still needs big sides. So, a lot more liters but only a tiny bit more energy consumption.
ps: living in an area with a high price per square meter goes against this strategy unless you manage to share a freezer
Yeah but if you transfer the energy as heat then you will end up with elongated structures (pipes).
You speak theoretically but metropolitan areas in these countries all have those pipes in place and in use for the better part of a century.
Using heat for heating has many redeeming qualities. Heat is high entropy and it is not a good idea to "waste" low entropy energy to create high entropy energy. Many industrial processes run on heat and waste heat is generated everywhere. The systems are also cheap to run once in place.
That's a real issue, but this is for a district heating system which already exists and already faces this issue. And yet the district heating system is presumably practical.
Changing to a different central source of heating (i.e. storage) seems orthogonal.
Is that a problem? Pipes are not technically complicated. Is there something else I'm missing?
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From the article:
> [250MWh] held in a container 14m high and 15m wide
According to Gemini 3.0 Pro, lifepo4 is 1.5-3.5x more dense than this, which isn't bad. 250MWh is a lot of capacity for such a small land footprint. At 2MW it can power ~2000 homes for ~5 days while taking up the land footprint of ~1 home.
What's the price? And how does the price scale with capacity?
The problem seems to be heat quality - they don’t get electricity back, it’s only good for heating. (Which admittedly makes perfect sense in the winter near the North Pole.)
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I was interested in trying to make a DIY thermal battery as a hobby experiment. Other than using thermal energy directly, I couldn't find a way to effectively convert the heat energy to electrical energy.
Peltier modules can be used to generate electricity, but they are crazy inefficient.
An efficient steam turbine is largely inaccessible to hobbiests and I am scared of steam/pressure. Though I did look at repurposing a car turbo for this purpose. There were additional issues with regulating the amount of heat you wanted to extract (load matching) and recycling waste heat.
I wondered if it was possible to use a Sterling engine, but you can't buy anything other than very small toys online and I don't have the facilities to machine my own.
Haha, would love to get something working, but I suppose I'm not smart enough to figure out an effective way to get that heat back out as usable/controlled electricity.
The answer in almost all electrical production boils down to spinning a turbine with steam (or wind). Nuclear does it, all the fossil fuels do it and ultimately heat batteries do it too. The alternative is photovoltaic or directly nuclear to electron production and then storage with chemical batteries or massive capacitors.
Most of our electrical production is based on a solution found several hundred years ago, we just made it really big and worked out how to control the heating and pressure of the steam well.
Non-steam turbines have been operated (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_vapour_turbine), but… steam is just so much easier to work with.
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You missed thermoelectric generators that uses the Seebeck effect to generate a current between two temperature differentials. It's terribly inefficient, unfortunately.
> An efficient steam turbine is largely inaccessible to hobbiests and I am scared of steam/pressure.
Thermal electricity generation really benefits from scale and extremes. The Carnot efficiency is proportional to the temperature differential between hot and cold. Even so-called "low quality" heat from a standard nuclear rector design is far hotter than anybody should deal with at home and it only gets ~1/3 efficiency. And dealing with small turbines is really inefficient too.
This is where batteries and solar really shine. They scale so well, and are extremely economical and electrically efficient.
Heat storage works well when you get beyond the scale of individual homes, but it's hard to make it work. I'd love to see something related to heat pumps in the future for homes, but district heating, such as could be accomplished by converting natural gas systems to heat delivery, are probably required for it to make sense.
Yeah, sadly, it seems almost impossible to get anything higher than 30% efficiency (theoretically with a Stirling engine, if you can find one, haha) out of a thermal battery without extreme pressures and temperatures.
Back-of-the-napkin math felt promising. A 1kg block of sand heated to 500 degrees Celsius should contain about 100Wh of electricity. Scaling that capacity up is easy, as it's just about adding sand or temperature (+ an effective method of transporting heat across the sand - maybe sand + used motor oil?).
Assuming 80% efficiency, tariff arbitrage (buy electricity during off-peak hours and use it during high-price hours) would pay off very quickly. In my area (Australia) it would be a matter of months - but the low real-world efficiency and lack of parts make it impossible.
It could work for heating during winter, though perhaps an AC/heatpump with the condenser a couple metres underground would be better value for money.
Heat storage can work for individual homes on the shorter scale. If you heat your home with in-floor heating (lower temperature requirements) you can have ~1-2m3 buffer tank that you heat up during the night and then use the stored heat during the day to heat your home. Works very well.
This project is for district heating, not producing electricity.
In general it is true that low-grade heat is difficult to convert to electricity, and there isn't any existing mass-market device that does it. You'll have to make your own, which involves learning to machine and responding to your perfectly reasonable fear of steam and pressure with proven safety measures.
In the articles case the end use of energy is household heating, so there is no need to convert back to electricity. The whole beauty of thermal energy storage that the end use of energy in many use cases is.. heat: heating buildings, cooking, industrial heating (from food processing to iron smelting), producing steam, etc.
Every couple of years I look around to see if anyone is selling sterling cycle engines in the 5-10 hp range, I always find a couple neat projects but nowhere can you just buy an engine.
I assume that because there is no current market for small sterling generators nobody wants invest in tooling to make one and because there are no small sterling generators there is no market for them.
If you need to use heating in a cold climate, you could use your stored energy to heat the radiator of a heat pump, which would then be drastically more efficient than using normal air on the radiator.
There's a video of people doing this on YouTube. They use the ground as their heat source. https://youtu.be/s-41UF02vrU
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_generator
Seebeck generator, generally. Peltier goes the opposite way. But basically the same thing.
If your hot source is really hot, thermophotovoltaic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermophotovoltaic_energy_conv...) makes sense and can offer much better efficiency...
LFP is so cheap that small-scale thermal battery makes not sense for electricity generation. Even in big scale (like OP) it mostly makes sense for heat, e.g. district heating systems, industry process heat, etc.
Why do so many people do "why didn't you..." As if the engineers who designed this didn't have 1002 alternatives and went with this one for reasons of budget, politics, prior knowledge, IPR costs, skills, religious beliefs, or a million other reasons.
Why did we go to the moon when we have perfectly good vacuum chambers here at home.
The implied "my way is better" in these responses is usually the bad take on "what made this better than my way" as a question which nobody really can answer unless the OP is the engineer.
"Why does Finland not deploy ubiquitous small nuclear reactors every 25 meters and make a heated road to the north you can drive over as well as get power from if you have a power adapter for finnish plugs"
In a cold climate, I would expect burying it to use the ground as a natural insulator. Why was an above ground design chosen?
Specifically, does the need for heavy insulation and the active heating of the sand make the ground a less effective or even problematic insulator? Could excavating and building a below-ground foundation for a high-temperature device like this be more complex and expensive than an above-ground silo? How would permafrost conditions affect this design?
> Why was an above ground design chosen?
Because digging is expensive and there's plenty of land. More efficient to use the budget to build a bigger structure than to build a smaller one and dig down. Bigger structure also gives you better insulation (surface area compared to volume decreases non-linearly with increased volume).
Also, digging in sand is easy. But blowing up granite isn't. The Ice age stripped a way a lot of soil in Finland.
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A website called energy-storage dot news should not be mixing up energy and power
I was surprised too at the 2nd sentence: "The project will have a heating power of 2MW and a thermal energy storage (TES) capacity of 250MW..."
and how a news outlet about energy could get such a fundamental unit wrong.
But given that later in the article it does revert to correct units (and the numbers are plausibly proportional), I assume it's just a typo. Strange that it hasn't been corrected even now.
"...It follows Polar Night Energy completing and putting a 1MW/100MWh Sand Battery TES project into commercial operations this summer..."
Interesting. Does anyone know what source of electricity is going to be used for this ? Probably solar but it might be also useful with coal plants or wind farms that produce even when there is not enough demand. How are they moving the heat ?
Wind in practice. There's only few hours of sunlight in the winter during the day. There has been a surge of electric boiler buildup by district heating companies in the last few years to exploit the periods of high wind and resulting very low electricity prices.
Heat is transferred using disctrict heating networks where 65-120 C water is circulated.
It's a heat battery for district heating. Could be other sources than electricity, e.g. municipal garbage incineration plant.
No, these generally use excess power during the night and windy days to store heat.
There's not that much CHP production that there'd be excess, plus they can adjust those plants well enough that there's no unnecessary burning going on.
See my other comment about Nordic power balancing.
Most likely not solar since there’s almost no solar during the winter months. Sun comes up at 0900 and goes down at 1500 in the south. In the north it’s worse.
It's currently noon in Finland and solar accounts for 6 MW in the grid. That's about 0.05% of the total production. Nuclear is 3863 MW (~31%) and wind is 6281 MW (~50%).
What might be plentiful is wind, especially during the nights.
Natural gas and wood chips,
> "The installation will supply heat to the Vääksy district heating network and is expected to lower fossil-based emissions by approximately 60% annually, primarily through an estimated 80% reduction in natural gas consumption and reduced reliance on wood chips."
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/11/25/finlands-polar-night-...
Those are the energy sources they're replacing with this tech - according to <https://reneweconomy.com.au/new-worlds-largest-sand-battery-...> it's surplus energy from renewables that will 'charge' the battery (so likely wind, hydro and solar that is produced but surplus to the grid's requirements)
These are interesting, but the cost per kWh of storage capacity is still probably too high for true seasonal storage. Short term storage runs into competition with batteries.
I point again to Standard Thermal for an idea tailored to true seasonal storage. I wait for more news from them, particularly on their very low cost resistive heater technology.
https://www.orcasciences.com/articles/standard-thermal
Doesn't need to be seasonal, we have enough energy in general to go through winter. This is to help through week long cold snaps, when Finland is short on energy. Week-long storage is still eyewateringly expensive with chemical batteries.
Also the capex from sand battery goes to (mostly) local construction, while when buying chemical batteries all the money goes to china.
But thermal storage doesn’t wear out, unlike batteries, right? So less future maintenance. Plus there is no danger of battery puncture.
More directly this is a very cold area. Enough it might effect battery storage enough to be a real problem.
I'm not sure why you think not wearing out would necessarily make up for the capex being too high. Interest rates aren't zero.
The big question is how much it will cost. For comparison I believe there is a heat battery in Germany using (atmospheric pressure) liquid water (98 C), 50M EUR for perhaps 20x the thermal storage capacity (versus 20 C water).
The use of sand, presumably heated to a much higher temperature than the boiling point of water, seems overkill for district heating (unless peak heat demand requires flow temperatures above 100 C). But it does reduce the volume of sand required, so the size of the storage system.
The cost is a function of the size and mass. So, more heat capacity and less mass means lower cost per mwh.
These things are extremely simple and fairly efficient. It's resistive heating (wires and spools) of a thermal mass (sand/stone) in some kind of container (a simple silo) with a lot of insulation and some pipes to heat up water. Higher temperatures mean getting the heat out is easier and that the battery will work for longer. Basically until the temperature drops below the required temperature.
Required temperature is 65 to 115... If you are already above those you only need simpler and cheaper heat exchanger instead of more complex heatpump.
>The use of sand, presumably heated to a much higher temperature than the boiling point of water
600°C according to their website.
It's probably my ignorance about this sector, but I do find it impressive that they are getting that much storage capacity in a small area:
> "This latest project will use locally available natural sand, held in a container 14m high and 15m wide."
AI says this volume will hold about 4000 tonnes of sand. Hence the high capacity.
would someone give an ELI5 on how a sand battery works? Is it just purely thermal mass, just with tons of sand?
There's pipework for circulating air inside it when they want to charge/discharge it, but yes, essentially it's mostly tons of sand.
They have resistors for charging it with electricity (resistors heat the air, air is circulated in the pipes which heats the sand) when the electricity price is cheap, and then for discharging they have a air-water heat exchanger so they can pump the heat energy into the district heating network.
Why do they use air for this instead of water?
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You use electricity (ideally cheap solar/wind) to heat air. That hot air circulates through a silo full of sand. The sand holds the heat for months. Later the heat is drawn out and used for buildings or industrial processes.
Those of us in the UK will recognise this as a giant "Economy 7 Night storage heater".
I do kind of wonder will those come back, with a slightly smarter heuristic for turning on than "it is night". They're inefficient next to a heat pump, but vastly cheaper to make and install, so with a smarter grid, they may be an appropriate sink for excess solar/wind in times of overproduction.
This is great news! Congrats for this fantastic progress.
I like how sand batteries are the equivalent of sleeping on the ashes of your fire
I never see sand battery before
between this and salt battery which one is the future???
AFAIK sandbattery is simpler (for district heating) and thus cheaper.
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There wasn't much about the energy equation there. And since it's just conversation with Gemini just pasted here, I'm not sure how much to trust it and it just feels lazy and disjointed.
EU is going to have to either
- embrace nuclear
- embrace North Africa, admitting them as member states, and doing massive solar there, and doing massive grid expansion to carry it north. And then in top of that, will their way to sufficient storage like the rest of us.
We'll see what they choose :D
EU does have trouble with solar seasonality, but wind is seasonally anti-correlated with solar, and the geospatial correlation between different wind turbines drops off more than linearly with distance, and the EU covers a very large land mass as-is. You can also over-build solar inside Europe to have reasonable collection during winter.
I also see no reason to admit North African states into the EU before an agreement can be reached about transporting solar. The geopolitical risks have always been about other states severing the link during a conflict with you, and less about the parties to the deal reneging. So whether Morocco or Algeria is part of the EU is quite immaterial to the risk profile.
This kind of thing really does need simulation modelling to be reasoned about properly. The one thing I am confident in saying is that these single sentence just-so stories about what is and isn't a good idea are going to be wrong, because the fundamental principle is statistical diversification, which needs to be approached through simulation rather than through words.
Here's your modeling site:
https://model.energy/
It's helpful to have two flavors of storage; one short term and efficient (batteries), one long term with low capex (hydrogen, thermal). The last is the most undeveloped but there are promising ideas.
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Why do you say "embrace nuclear" when the EU has substantial existing and planned nuclear plants? (Current gen is something like 24% nuclear in EU, 20% in wider Europe, 18% USA, 4.4% China)
And anyway, alongside that world leading nuclear already in existence why wouldn't they just install lots of cheap solar and wind, and heat pumps and EVs and reduce their imports of energy from their current high levels (about .6 Trillion euros in 2022, down to .35 in 2024 though that seems mostly a change in price, volume has declined only slightly)
The EU has plenty of solar and wind resources.
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Finland's current energy equation according to Google Gemini:
Gemini: ... In summary, Finland imports waste (mainly as pre-processed fuel) to feed its modern waste-to-energy plants, which are a key part of its heating and energy strategy, especially as domestic residual waste volumes decrease due to better recycling and as a replacement for former Russian renewable fuel imports.
Gemini: ... This processing turns smelly, inconsistent "garbage" into a stable, high-quality, non-hazardous secondary fuel that is compliant with strict EU waste shipment and energy production regulations. The whole point of the import is to fuel power plants efficiently, which requires this specific, processed product.
Gemini: ... Sometimes ....
Gemini: ... It is clear that the environmental integrity and quality of life for residents of Loviisa have been compromised by the need to fuel Finland's waste-to-energy capacity with large, sometimes substandard, imports. etc etc.
===
Short summary: The Pro-Russian Green "Pedophile"-Party destroyed the existing energy infrastructure which ran on coal from Poland etc. A new system was built to use "renewable" Russian gas and Russian wood industry leftovers.
The situation is desperate; any shit from anywhere at any cost is better than using local renewable biomass, such as peat.
Finland has enormous amounts of peat, which is worth more than Norway's oil reserves.
The comment is slightly incoherent in it's argumentation, but factually correct.
I think the point is the energy policies in some of the nordics are as arbitrary and politics driven as anywhere.
How this is directly related to the sand battery is not clear to me, but it does paint an accurate if partial picture of the milieu.
Pedophiles were insulted, I am sorry. Correct English expression is maybe "Baby Lovers"? I dont know.
Calling Green Party "Pro Russian" is ridiculous. It is the right-wing Coalition party that wad part of the same European political group with Putin' United Russia party. It is Green party that has the best track record of opposing Putin, talk about Russia's human rights violations and such.
Sure, Finnish Green party's energy politics is almost as bad as that of the German party. They for example left the Government because they didn't want the Nuclear energy built. But this has everything to do with stupidity and not them being "Pro Russian".
Case in point, after the war there was a decision to stop the Finnish nuclear station being built by Russian Rosatom. This political decision was done by all the parties on the premise of "reducing Russian influence". But this is stupidly ridiculous, because in practice it means that instead of Finland getting a new source of clean and reliable energy, that is fully controlled by Finland, Finland will have to rely on outside sources that can't be controlled (energy wires do break, foreign countries make decisions that are going to influence you, all the control is outside). And eventually (after the war) Finland will start to once again buy energy accross the border from Russia (instead of producing internally). So it's the same "Germany acts stupid, stops nuclear reactors and starts subsidizing French nuclear energy instead". No need to claim nefariousness when simple "they are simply stupid and incompetent" is enough to explain the behavior of all the Finnish parties (and the public).
"Pedophile" is equally non-sensical adhominem.
Hey @grok. Is there some grounds to call the Green Party a Pedophile Party?
Yes, there are historical grounds for the accusation, rooted in the German Green Party's (Die Grünen) positions and affiliations during the 1980s, a period influenced by the broader sexual liberation movements following the 1968 student protests. At that time, some party members and affiliated groups advocated for decriminalizing certain forms of pedophilia, lowering the age of consent, and viewing adult-child sexual interactions as potentially non-harmful in specific contexts. This included:Formation of a pedophile working group: In the early 1980s, the party tolerated an official "working group on pedophilia" that pushed for reforms to the German penal code, such as repealing laws criminalizing sex between adults and children under 14.
dw.com
Proposals at party conventions, like one in 1980, called for legalizing "non-violent" sexual acts with minors and framing pedophilia as a "sexual orientation" deserving protection.
spiegel.de
Key figures and statements: Prominent members, including future European Parliament leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit, made controversial remarks; in a 1982 TV appearance, he described playful sexual interactions with young children as an "erotic-manic game" based on his experiences as a kindergarten teacher.
dw.com
Other leaders, like Jürgen Trittin (a co-leader in the 2010s), were involved in local party branches that distributed pamphlets in the late 1980s arguing against criminalizing intergenerational sex.
spiegel.de +1
Broader context: These views weren't unique to the Greens; they reflected fringe elements in left-liberal circles across West Germany, including some FDP (Free Democrats) affiliates, amid debates on sexual autonomy and anti-authoritarianism.
Peat grows at about 1 mm per year, if it regrows at all at the location where you did the extraction.