This is an odd issue to have as a "modern" country, but geopolitics are complicated.
I'm surprised that our government didnt see this coming, considering the Ukraine-Russia conflict has been going on for nearly a decade - maybe we need to revisit some other dependencies as well?
Either way, this giant thermos is a cool idea, and I wish we had the same in my city now!
Tangentially related rant;
Man, it sucks we (im german) dont ever listen to any qualified experts anymore, unless they tell us what we want to hear.
I love feelings and emotions as much as the next guy, and I appreciate a good story that can make me cry and feel things, but we didnt really have to talk ourselves into being so scared of nuclear to turn it off indefinitely.
It's one of those decisions that was made completely out of fear, and to appeal to the voters, I assume. It's fucked us royally, and it's absolutely miserable to see that other countries with "worse" governments do a better job of this. Still almost everyone I know will argue "do you want a Chernobyl next to our city???", and seemingly, this is the kind of irrational thing this government uses as core points for making decisions.
I'm out of here first chance I get, if someone wants to offer me a job literally anywhere where the government can read and listen, im taking it.
Interesting. Some of the energy conscious home builders have used the same concept for quite some time but of course not many of them. This concept is also in my "energy efficient dream house" wish list. I think it demonstrates that in fact Europe can innovate when there is pressure on it.
I find it always fascinating that water is often in the center of energy production and storage, like turning it to steam or in a dam, using gravity storage or in this instance a large thermos. I wonder if this same concept cold be used with something like molten salt if the heat source is hot enough, to store it in a large thermos to heat water, would it be more efficient or could it even work, the heat source would have to be really hot but it could potentially store more energy than water without increasing pressure. Energy storage is one of the trickiest things that we have to solve to have a good energy mixture in the future.
The structure doesn't appear to be that large for this claim. So I wonder if they will continue to scale it after this winter. I could easily see 8-10 of these sitting on an industrial outer edge of a city
>You can imagine the storage tank as a large thermos flask, but it never gets empty. The hot water with a temperature of 98 degrees Celsius is at the top, cooler water layers at the bottom, with the cold water still having a temperature of about 50 degrees. A pipeline of about 400 meters connects the storage tank to the pump house where four pumps ensure that hot water reaches the tank. It is pumped into the top of the storage tank and is also taken out here when needed. If hot water is added at the top, the same amount of cold water is taken out at the bottom. So only the quantity ratio between hot and cooler water in the storage facility changes but not the total amount of water. At maximum output of 200 Megawatt thermal, the storage facility can provide heat for about 13 hours.
It appears to be resistive when the electric part is being used, but looks like it also takes waste heat from a coal combined heat and power unit, and some other industrial heat sources.
I think the electric heat part is to help provide load balancing so theyre probably aiming for cheap and simple as it'll be used intermittently.
It is possible to have heat pumps at the other end of district heat systems, to let individual units pull heat from the shared source and also feed it back im when in AC mode.
I'm surprised that our government didnt see this coming, considering the Ukraine-Russia conflict has been going on for nearly a decade - maybe we need to revisit some other dependencies as well?
Either way, this giant thermos is a cool idea, and I wish we had the same in my city now!
Tangentially related rant;
Man, it sucks we (im german) dont ever listen to any qualified experts anymore, unless they tell us what we want to hear.
I love feelings and emotions as much as the next guy, and I appreciate a good story that can make me cry and feel things, but we didnt really have to talk ourselves into being so scared of nuclear to turn it off indefinitely.
It's one of those decisions that was made completely out of fear, and to appeal to the voters, I assume. It's fucked us royally, and it's absolutely miserable to see that other countries with "worse" governments do a better job of this. Still almost everyone I know will argue "do you want a Chernobyl next to our city???", and seemingly, this is the kind of irrational thing this government uses as core points for making decisions.
I'm out of here first chance I get, if someone wants to offer me a job literally anywhere where the government can read and listen, im taking it.