RMS messing about with a sand battery

[AE-NMidlands]

Now gas has got more costly and we're more focussed on the environmental impact, it looks like electric storage heating is having a bit of a resurgence.

but (my) electricity is still 3.5 times the price of gas...

[Oldgreybeard]

Now gas has got more costly and we're more focussed on the environmental impact, it looks like electric storage heating is having a bit of a resurgence.

but (my) electricity is still 3.5 times the price of gas...

Yes, but that's not the point, is it? The idea is to try and reduce curtailment of wind, or perhaps PV, generation by feeding the excess into a big thermal store and then using the heat to do something useful later.

There's also the option to use cheap (sometimes negatively priced) off-peak electricity and store it as heat for use when electricity is a lot more expensive.

I do exactly this with a Sunamp phase change thermal store. That either gets charged up by excess PV generation that we cannot use, or it gets charged up overnight when electricity is cheaper. Most of our hot water usage is when electricity is expensive, so this makes a great deal of sense.

[Gareth J]

Now gas has got more costly and we're more focussed on the environmental impact, it looks like electric storage heating is having a bit of a resurgence.

but (my) electricity is still 3.5 times the price of gas...

Yes, but that's not the point, is it? The idea is to try and reduce curtailment of wind, or perhaps PV, generation by feeding the excess into a big thermal store and then using the heat to do something useful later.

There's also the option to use cheap (sometimes negatively priced) off-peak electricity and store it as heat for use when electricity is a lot more expensive.

I do exactly this with a Sunamp phase change thermal store. That either gets charged up by excess PV generation that we cannot use, or it gets charged up overnight when electricity is cheaper. Most of our hot water usage is when electricity is expensive, so this makes a great deal of sense.

I do this with our wind turbine. Not to the level of your chapel experience unfortunately, and not enough buffer/total generation to make do without burning something too. But same in principle. Blowing a gale an the house is currently toasty as TS is full and heat is being dumped elsewhere. At grid scale, no turbine should be turned off while people in the vicinity are burning stuff to keep warm. It should be a win, win. Scaled up, I think that heat pumps and boreholes are a more likely useful form of big thermal storage. No thermal medium costs, no insulation costs.