Corporate Knights
Summary
In the late 2010s, when Tommi Eronen and Markku Ylönen were working on their graduate degrees at the Tampere University of Technology, in Finland, they began to toy around with the idea of how to make their community 100% heat self-sufficient. The regional power grid delivered plenty of wind power, but the problem, as with renewables everywhere, was how to store the excess energy so it could be used when needed.
Eronen’s first instinct: a massive water tank linked to solar thermal panels that could store heat, to be used in a district energy system. “Would that be economically and technically viable?” they wondered. The answer, as it turned out, was no. What they needed, instead, was a medium in which to store the high level of heat – as much as 650°C – generated by the electrical current flowing out of photovoltaic panels. That substance would have to be inert, non-combustible, not prone to melting or boiling, and cheap.
That light bulb moment provided the spark for what would become Polar Night Energy, now a 25-person firm that develops sand batteries to serve industries and communities with renewable energy and district heating systems.
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