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.
They recently built a pilot plant that seems to go way beyond the prototype stage at 100 MWh. This technology obviously still has a long way to go to mainstream adoption, but just writing it off because it seems farfetched is pretty shortsighted.
Well, I’m still sceptic and the marketing driven website low in details doesn’t really help. Most of these projects conveniently forget the whole supply chain for the needed resources. But if it works, then great! The more solutions we have the more chance we have as humanity to survive.
Well, they’re building the thing. Then they’ll be running the thing for a while. Then we’ll see if it really works technically and economically.
I wouldnt really call being able to sub in for 10 wind turbines for 4 hours “way beyond the prototype stage”. Especially given its losing 1 in 5 joules generated and require a fuckload of concrete to construct.