As global energy demand accelerates, one truth remains underappreciated: heat is the largest end use of energy. Today, more than 50 percent of global final energy consumption is dedicated to ...

Batteries are the key to the future of the most abundant sources of renewable energy, solar and wind power for one obvious reason: intermittence. If power generators want to replace fossil fuels ...

Haley Mast is a freelance writer, fact-checker, and small organic farmer in the Columbia River Gorge. She enjoys gardening, reporting on environmental topics, and spending her time outside ...

Brewing beer on a large scale requires large amounts of hot steam for fermentation. Rather than relying on fossil fuels, ...

A small town in Finland is experimenting with a new type of infrastructure: the world’s largest sand battery. The battery—a 42-foot-tall, nearly 50-foot-wide silo filled with 2,000 tons of crushed ...

The community swimming pool in the Finnish town of Kankaanpää is heated with sand—well, a sand battery, to be more specific. Energy utility Vatajankoski has partnered with Polar Night Energy, a ...

Finland is harnessing the unexpected power of sand to decarbonise industrial heat – a major “blind spot” in global emissions. Industrial heat production is one of the largest and hardest-to-solve ...

A research group from Ghana has developed a solar PV-powered steam cooker (ISESC) with sand-based thermal energy storage (TES). “The potential of sand, given its thermal stability and low cost, has ...

In our ongoing quest for sustainable energy solutions, innovative technologies are necessary to complement renewable sources like solar and wind power. One such potential breakthrough revolves around ...

A Finnish-Swedish consortium has designed a hybrid system that uses photovoltaics and solar thermal energy separately to provide steam to industrial facilities. The PV unit is coupled to a sand-based ...

For more than a century, fossil fuel companies have drilled oil and gas wells to increase the production, consumption, and export of fossil fuels. These wells are often abandoned once they are no ...