Clean, renewable energy projects are on the rise as our society slowly moves away from dirty, polluting forms of energy like gas and oil. Now that we have figured out how to efficiently harvest energy from the sun and wind, the next big question is how to store all that energy for future use.
Researchers at the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory have figured out a way to do that relatively cheaply and efficiently by using one extremely common material: sand.
The process of using sand to store energy, known as “thermal energy storage,” involves using heaters powered by renewable energy like wind and solar to raise the temperature of sand particles. The resulting hot sand can then be stored in silos, with the trapped thermal energy to be converted into electricity at a future time.
Thermal energy storage has many advantages over the more common battery storage. Sand is much cheaper than the stuff used for…
