Thermal energy storage doesn’t get enough attention. The world’s thermal storage facility currently being built in Finland will be able to store a whopping 90GWh - that’s 30x more than the largest electric storage facility in operation today. interestingengineering.com/energy/caver...
The Varanto project design comprises three caverns, each measuring over 900 feet (300 m) long, 131 feet (40 m) high, and 65 feet (20 m) wide.
By my back of an envelope calculation, that's enough to heat about 6000 homes for a UK heating season - but of course that's based on the assumption of no available top-up in winter, which is unreasonable given the availability of cheap wind energy. So yeah, it could smooth a lot of intermittency.
I agree. Thermal storage can play a huge role in our decarbonized future, at the scale of a community, or for individual homes. The technology is simple, and it seems the cost should be relatively low.
Storage is the key to sustainability.
I met up with an old friend last week who’s working on using boreholes to store heat. Cheap and efficient long term heat storage.
And an order of magnitude cheaper than electrical storage. Great seeing large scale thermal storage getting discussed!