It's a thermal battery to capture renewable peak output.
The headline is confusing.
this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2026
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Oh that's clever. I hope it lives up to the claimed cost savings, because if it does it's much more likely to see rapid adoption
Using flowing sand in a thermal battery is interesting. They're flowing cold sand through an electric heater to heat it up and store that heat, then flowing the hot sand as one of the fluids through a heat exchanger with whatever you're actually trying to heat, whether its air or water or oil, and then storing the now cold sand to be reheated.
I guess if you have some way of concentrating and dumping industrial heat into the sand, that could replace the electric heater and let it run off of some existing industrial process
This stored heat can be used in industrial processes regardless of real-time electricity availability.
If this scales and becomes affordable this can really have a big impact.
Would a solar collector do a more efficient job of heating this sand?
Of course you could use that source, but the topic here is not about the source of electrical energy. It is about storage and constant availability.