pwr_october-2024 - 12

GLOBAL MONITOR
land is a small country with a good balance
of these conditions. Hybrid farms
also ensure that the projects are cost-effective,
unlike the wind farms in Germany,
which proved to be overly costly due
to the number of wind turbines, and their
limitations. Hybrid systems can help improve
the baseload of the electricity system,
which is the minimum amount of
power needed at any given time. Hybrid
farms can be easily connected to the national
grid without the need for additional
transmission lines, saving on labor costs
and other additional costs. They also
maximize efficiency by harnessing the
strengths of wind and solar power. "
Google recently announced its project
designed to cool a data center in
Hamina, in the south of Finland, is being
expanded into a district energy project
for the community. Google said that
next year it would launch its first offsite
heat recovery project, working with local
utility Haminan Energia. " Heat coming
out of our Finnish data centre will be
rerouted and provided free of charge, "
Google wrote on its website. " We will
be recovering heat at the Google Hamina
data center, which operates today with
carbon-free energy at 97%. This means
the recovered heat will also be 97%
carbon free. " Haminan Energia said the
project will meet 80% of the local district
heating network's annual demand.
Google has a major presence in Hamina,
a port city on the Gulf of Finland. The
company has said that since 2011 it has
pumped water from the nearby bay to
cool its servers. A company official said,
" We've long wanted to channel our recovered
heat offsite to be used by the
local community. "
The district heating project was announced
at the same time as Google
said it would invest €1 billion ($1.1 billion)
into a seventh expansion of its Hamina
data center. The Helsinki Times quoted a
Google official as saying the investment
" will help to unlock the potential of artificial
intelligence for companies not only in
Kymenlaakso [the region where Hamina
is located], but across Finland and Europe. "
Finnish officials have said Google
has been the biggest investor in Finland
for the past decade.
" Finland is harnessing the power
of waste-to-heat technology to meet
its heating and cooling needs, " said
Daniel Jarrett, CEO of Australia-based
Queensland Solar and Lighting. Jarrett
has experience in researching global energy
markets, including during his time
as Energy Manager at ActewAGL, an
12
Australian utility. " This process takes
heat from burning trash and industrial
processes and turns it into thermal energy
that can be used. The technology
does two things: it provides a long-lasting
source of heat and a big boost to
reducing the amount of trash that ends
up in landfills. In Finland, waste-to-heat
plants are often connected to district
heating systems. This makes it easy to
get heat to homes and businesses in cities, "
he explained.
Jarrett told POWER, " In Finland, the
first step in the waste-to-heat process
is usually collecting and sorting household
and business waste. Then, things
that can't be recycled are burned in facilities
that are specifically made for that
purpose. The heat that is released during
this burning is collected and used to
make steam, which can be used to heat
directly or to turn turbines that make
electricity. This approach, which produces
both heat and electricity, makes the
system even more efficient as a whole. "
Jarrett added, " Finland's waste-to-heat
plants have high-tech pollution control
systems to keep the damage to the
environment to a minimum. These systems
make sure that the emissions from
burning things meet strict rules for the
environment. Also, the ash that is made
when things are burned is often recycled
and used in building materials. This helps
reduce waste even more and supports a
circular economy. "
Klemetti said bringing various industries
together on energy projects is likely
to continue. " Sector integration could
progress even further. I see potential in
harnessing unavoidable process gases
from energy production and manufacturing.
Interesting things are happening with
syngas fermentation, " he said. " Companies
like Synata Bio from the U.S. now
have the ability to take waste offgases
from processes like chemical production
or municipal solid waste incineration and
ferment them into ethanol. Crucially, such
ethanol can then be processed into lowcarbon
chemicals and sustainable aviation
fuel, which, in the latter case, would help
the EU fulfill its new mandate in greening
the aviation sector. "
-Darrell Proctor is a senior
editor for POWER.
Italy to Debut Industrial Sand
Battery
Italian firm Magaldi Group, a specialist
4.
The Magaldi Green Thermal Energy Storage
(MGTES) solution uses fluidized solid silica
sand particles, which are stable as storage
material to over 1,000C. Courtesy: Magaldi
Group
mal energy storage system that uses a
fluidized bed of silica sand. By the end
of 2024, the system will be installed at
an industrial facility owned by food company
IGI in Buccino, Italy.
The Magaldi Green Thermal Energy
Storage (MGTES) system is essentially
a long-duration energy storage (LDES)
solution that can be applied to both power-to-heat
and power-to-heat-to-power
applications, the company told POWER.
The modular " sand battery " stores energy
from renewable sources, and then releases
it in the form of high-temperature
steam of between 120C and 400C.
Conceived and developed by Magaldi
Group, MGTES uses a sand bed comprising
fluidized solid silica sand particles
to store energy as sensible heat at " high
temperature and high energy density, "
Magaldi explained (Figure 4). The system
operates in three distinct phases. During
the charging phase, electrical heaters
powered by renewable energy are used
to heat the solid particle bed. Air flowing
through the sand bed fluidizes the sand
bed, significantly enhancing heat transfer
and internal diffusivity. In the storage
phase, the fluidization is stopped, allowing
the sand to pack at the bottom of the
module, absorbing energy and storing it
for " days and even weeks, " the company
said. " Energy losses are minimized due
to the lack of convection and the tank's
insulation, which restricts heat exchange
with the exterior of the casing, " it said.
During discharge, the integrated heat
in ultra-high-temperature material
handling, is poised to deploy its first
large-scale application of a novel therwww.powermag.com
exchanger
embedded within the fluidized
bed of sand particles is reversed to
discharge the system. " Activating the fluid
bed, accumulated energy is released,
by means of in-bed heat exchangers, to
the heat transfer fluid-typically superPOWER
| October 2024
http://www.powermag.com
pwr_october-2024

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