[arowthway]

This is super cool but the ending is bizarre.

> A comment on the YouTube video below complained, “Not a word about return on investment in the presentation. That means it’ll never pay off” MAGAlomaniacs are everywhere these days.

Given the supposed 50+ year lifespan of such a battery, I find it hard to believe it doesn't turn a profit at some point. And I understand that debunking low-effort accusations is asymmetric warfare. But why cite a random YouTube comment if you have no intention of addressing its claims? A more charitable interpretation is that it's meant to ragebait the readers. But to me, it seems like trying to make people feel ashamed for having doubts, by making a public example of a skeptic.

[kragen]

If, say, further insulating your house or building a sand battery will pay for itself in 50 years, it's a bad investment, financially speaking, and probably environmentally speaking as well. You can deploy "the same amount" of resources in something else with a higher ROI, like maybe solar panels with a one-year payback, and get a much bigger benefit. This is an important consideration as long as you are constrained by some kind of resource limitation.

So I think ROI is a first-order consideration.

[danielfoster]

I agree with you, but one point I see everyone missing is the fact that this is a first-time installation of a new technology that hasn’t scaled. There needs to be a business plan of course. At the same time, no one would expect to see ROI figures for the first build of a concept car.

[kragen]

That's because concept cars aren't investments. This project is an investment. Investors invest in investments to get a return on their investment (ROI). Car buyers, other than car dealers and outfits like Budget Rent-A-Car, do not buy cars to get ROI. Advertising an investment without publishing any projected ROI figures (the business plan you mention) is like advertising a concept car without publishing any photos, video, or drawings.

And I don't think it's accurate to say, "this is a first-time installation of a new technology that hasn’t scaled". People have been using thermal energy storage for household heating for literally millions of years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_mass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_energy_storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storage_heater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ondol#Advantages_and_disadvant... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_thermal_energy_storag... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masonry_heater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_source_heat_pump https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trombe_wall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feolite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Landing_Solar_Community https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kang_bed-stove https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthship#Thermal_performance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_mass_heater https://www.helen.fi/en/news/2018/Gigantic-cavern-heat-stora... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barra_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storage_heater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_shelter#Active_and_passi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokpoort_CSP#Energy_storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_stove#Design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_solar_building_design#... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquifer_thermal_energy_storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_energy_storage#Thermal_en... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qanat#Cooling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regenerative_heat_exchanger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rammed_earth#History https://www.mha-net.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solana_Generating_Station#Ener... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_water_storage_tank

[bryanlarsen]

Finland is the only country in the world where solar isn't the cheapest form of electricity because they get so little sun and they have good alternatives.

[hulium]

Certainly not the only country. Iceland is even more extreme in this regard and unlike Finland it is powered by 100% renewables, hydro and geothermal energy. In Finland the only good renewable alternative is wood/biomass.

[bryanlarsen]

Seems reasonable. I'll have to dig up my source to double check. Maybe they just didn't have Iceland data in their set? It's certainly a surprising result to see other non-sunny places like the UK, Germany, Norway & Sweden have solar as their cheapest energy source.

[kragen]

It's hard to get really solid estimates for solar costs because they've been dropping so precipitously, and because they depend on so many ancillary factors: wiring, inspections, permitting, power electronics, storage, and so on. Getting solid estimates for solar return on investment is even harder, because it depends on the future price of energy.

[bryanlarsen]

Yes, it's certainly possible that Iceland is better for solar than Finland not because of its sunlight, but because of those myriad extra factors.

[CRConrad]

Actually, calling geothermal energy "renewable" is a bit of a misnomer, isn't it? At least if the heat energy in the Earth's crust, which is what "geothermal energy" harvests, comes from the inside. The Earth's core may not be cooling down very fast, but we know for sure it's not getting any warmer (not before the Sun in its death throes swells up into a red giant and swallows the inner planets, anyway).

Yeah, I know, super-nitpicky — but, hey, it's the Best Kind Of Correct™. (Unless the crust is actually heated more by the Sun than from below, but I doubt that.)

[kragen]

Most geothermal energy comes from the decay of radioactive elements in the Earth's crust, although heat from Earth's formation is a non-negligible fraction of it. If you check out the web site of Iceland's geothermal energy agency, I believe they do have a calculation there of the sustainable power level that could be extracted (without cooling down the crust), but I don't remember if they're currently above or below it.

If I recall correctly, however, the fossil heat trapped in the crust under Iceland is several billion years of the sustainable extraction rate.

And, on the third hand, even if you only extract energy at the rate that radioactive decay produces it, in only a few tens of billions of years, most of the radioisotopes will have decayed away if you don't replenish them.

You are correct that the crust is heated more from below than by the Sun. That's why the bottom of the crust, where it contacts the mantle, is hotter than the surface.

[fulafel]

You could be forgiven to think that about northern places, but the dark winters are compensated by the long (or even round the clock) daylight in summer. It's still fewer sunlight hours than markedly sunny places like italy or california but not 50% less.

see eg this map where scandinavia is the same color as france or southern uk: https://vividmaps.com/annual-sunshine-hours-of-world/

But of course wind is more stable around the year and produces more in the winter when there's more need for energy. And the sunlight is more direct closer to the equator.

[bryanlarsen]

I didn't just think that, I read it in a news article about a study. My memory of what I read may be faulty, though.

Besides fewer sunlight hours, Finland also has lots of clouds and very steep sun angles which significantly affects production.

[fulafel]

The cloudiness is accounted for in the visualization, otherwise you wouldn't see that much variation on the same latitudes. But yep the sun angle affects things too like I mentioned.

[grues-dinner]

There's also some long-term risk here. If we, humans, did massive amounts of dispatchable solar and wind, plus systems like this, static battery storage, other storage and things like widespread EV capacity arbitrage, it's not guaranteed that the negative or even low energy price events would even happen. The more people think they can store it and sell it later, the higher the demand for off-peak power. You could end up with op-ex exceeding revenue in the future.

Then again, the same also goes for the other storage methods as the spread compresses. Eventually, as always, it all comes down to who can do it on the thinnest shoestring. 1/4 the cost, but the thermodynamic efficiency is 1/3 (direct heat vs batteries + heat pump, say) is still a winner. Finns aren't going to stop needing heat in winter soon, and if you can provide it even a fraction under the cost of battery electricity and a heat pump, you get the customer. And the district heat infrastructure probably already exists.

[moooo99]

Its of course true that this will somewhat even out once storage becomes more available. But there are still market forces at play. If the electricity prices are higher, operators have a renewed financial incentive to generate more power (more power = more revenue), for example by re-powering solar and wind farms.

Theoretically this would be an endless cycle, which is of course constrained by very practical needs of the electricity users.

[ta1243]

People nowadays expect 10% return on their investment, so if you invest 1m you need to make 100k a year from it (120k to cover the deprecation over 50 years)

If you made 30k a year for 50 years you'd return 1.5m from your 1m investment, but you're only making 3%, which is a low return especially given the future risk (you'd have to run for 33 years just to get your initial investment back)

Either way it's worthwhile, because the reason people expect 10% is because the externalities are borne by others. Majority of people and countries in the world do not deem ROI to be the sole or even primary driver for investment, and judging investments only on the immediate financial reward already biases the conversation

[Avamander]

> Majority of people and countries in the world do not deem ROI to be the sole or even primary driver for investment

It's partially that, other part is that we aren't really pricing in all the externalities of everything out there. So it's not that "there's no ROI", it's that "we aren't factoring things in the ROI calculation".

So while a heat battery might not make a huge profit, the ability to burn less fuel (less air pollution, less waste, etc), to offer redundancy and stability, the know-how and work it creates, that is all valuable as well.

[hliyan]

Externalities can (and should) be priced in by taxes that offest negative externalities (e.g. carbon emissions, pollution). Unfortunately, legislative bodies that have to decide on taxes have a much cozier relationship with industry than they do with those who must endure the effects of negative externalities (the general population).

[ta1243]

Put a carbon tax on fuel in a western country and you end up with an unhappy population who pay more money in tax. Personally I'd distribute the revenue as a UBI which would mean the most polluting would be worse off but the average person would be better off.

The people who would mostly benefit from reduction in emissions - especially in the short term - are those in other countries. It's not going to be Finland suffering the most from doubling of the cost of food from failed harvests, it's going to be massive failures in rice harvests in south east asia. Finns will always be able to outcompete the average Cambodian when buying food.

One of the costs of emissions to western countries - say Spain - is increased bad weather - more frequent storms, fires etc. All fairly small stuff compared with mass starvation or water shortages though. That starvation leads to another problem -- increased migration pressure.

But those costs are going to be borne anyway. Even if Spain stopped emitting CO2, it wouldn't make an ounce of difference. International agreements have failed time after time to curb emissions.

The main benefit of renewable energy for a given country isn't the reduction in emissions, it's the increase in energy independence - no need to import gas or oil from unstable countries.

[strken]

It's possible and often desirable to calculate the estimated impact of externalities, positive and negative. Human lives are (in)famously given a monetary value by environmental agencies to enable this calculation.

I think the more likely explanation is that this is a pilot project by a clean energy startup, it intentionally operates at a loss because it's RnD rather than mature tech, everyone involved is okay with this, and the company doesn't want to release its modelling of future ROI because that's valuable proprietary data and giving it away to clients and competitors is dumb.

[kragen]

> Majority of people and countries in the world do not deem ROI to be the sole or even primary driver for investment

I think this is a little unfair. If it were true, it would be the reason for wealth inequality: you're saying that the majority of people and countries are so financially irresponsible that they consume any resources they get without investing any. But in fact everyone I have observed closely, in every socioeconomic group, tries to optimize ROI. Most of them aren't very good at it, but they do try.

On the other hand, people who expect a 10% risk-free return are just going to get scammed. There are 10% opportunities in most people's lives—weatherstripping, coupon clipping, bulk food buying, etc.—but you can run out pretty quickly.

[ta1243]

> There are 10% opportunities in most people's lives

Average S&P total return (reinvesting dividends) is well over 10% over any appreciable timeframe (say 30 years), even during really low times (say buying at the peaks in 1999 or 1972)

[zahlman]

The long term average is a bit over 10%, but there are definitely 30-year periods that have fared worse than that.

[ta1243]

Which specific 30 year period?

[kragen]

If we restrict our attention to the cherry-picked-with-hindsight US stock market, the worst 30-year period would probably be 01929 to 01959, although 01903 to 01933 isn't that great either. The S&P 500 only goes back to 01957, but https://www.econstats.com/eqty/eq_d_na_4.csv shows the DJIA at US$382.01 on 01929-09-05. 30 years later, on 01959-09-04, it had reached US$653.91. That's 1.8% return per year, which is lower than 10%.

But wait! Those are nominal numbers, not inflation-adjusted numbers. And the dollar had lost nearly half its value over those 30 years! According to https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=382.01&year1=1..., US$382.01 in September 01929 would be worth US$646.99 in September 01959. So the inflation-adjusted return was 0.035% per year. At least it's not negative! And that doesn't even include the dividends!

Nowhere close to competitive with insulating your house or bulk-buying food, though.

[kragen]

That's cherry-picking a single country's stock market with the benefit of hindsight, though. Over the time frame you're talking about, that country became the world's sole superpower and also underwent an unprecedented redistribution of income from workers to investors. Neither of those things can happen again in the US, they aren't very likely to happen anywhere else, and if you had invested at those points in time, you wouldn't have known they were going to happen. If investors had known they were going to happen, they would have bid the price up higher earlier on.

And of course it isn't a risk-free return.

Consider what happened to investors in Germany, Hungary, or Romania in the 01930s, or South Vietnam in the 01960s, or Afghanistan in the 01970s, or Iraq in the 01990s.

You might think this is irrelevant because you don't live in 01930s Germany or 01970s Afghanistan or 01990s Iraq; you live in the USA.

But, if you live in the USA, you don't live in the USA of the 01970s or the 01930s. You live in the USA of 02025. In 02025, the country most like 01930s USA or 01970s USA is China, which is obvious if you read books from the USA from those periods. The USA in 02025 is the country that's been trying and failing to build high-speed rail for 60 years, since Japan got it working, and just elected a xenophobic demagogue who praises dictatorship; it's much more like 01980s Russia or 01930s Italy.

Warren Buffett said that, in the long run, you can't expect the stock market to return more than the long-run economic growth rate, which you can't expect to consistently be more than 3%. I don't understand the logic behind either of these propositions, but I suspect Buffett knows more about market returns than I do.

— ⁂ —

By contrast, if you can get an 0.8% discount on the potatoes your family eats by bulk-buying enough potatoes for the next three months, that's about a 10% annual return on investment, and the risk is pretty low—and almost entirely under your control. And, in practice, you can often get a much bigger discount than that, especially if you assign some cost to the errand of going potato shopping. You just have to make sure you have proper potato storage and that you don't have a sudden dropoff in family potato consumption.

How do I figure that ROI? Well, the amount of extra money you have tied up in potatoes oscillates between two months' worth and zero, with an average of one month of potatoes. But your expenditures on potatoes are 0.8% less each month, which is your earnings from that investment. Every year, you save 10% of a month of potatoes: 10% of your investment. Tax-free.

If you learn to calculate ROIs and reorganize your household expenses on the basis of ROIs, whatever income you have will go dramatically further than it would for someone who hasn't done that.

[ta1243]

> Romania in the 01930s

You've lost me.

[kragen]

Great! Recognizing you're lost is the first step to getting found.

[anon191928]

they print more than %10 each year, LMAO. people are not smart. remember

[testdelacc1]

I really like this comment. Concisely explains the points of view on an investment like this. There’s not much more to add.

This is why I open the comments before the link.

[lupusreal]

> And I understand that debunking low-effort accusations is asymmetric warfare

Is the comment even that unfair? Asserting that it will never pay off because the presentation avoided mentioning anything about the payoff might be a little bit cynical, but not terribly so. It could be fairly presumed that if the project is a clear economic win, they would be proudly bragging about it; and the opposite presumption is also reasonably fair, even if it turns out to be wrong.

And what does such cynicism have to do with "MAGA"? That asserted association seems much worse than the initial cynical assertion.

[blueflow]

> And what does such cynicism have to do with "MAGA"?

"Everyone i don't like is Hitler". It's a rather immature way of disagreeing.

There is a KYM page about this phenomenon: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/everyone-i-dont-like-is-hitle...

[vjk800]

> Given the supposed 50+ year lifespan of such a battery

Surely the lifespan is almost forever. It's just a tank full of sand and some heating pipes. Maybe the pipes and/or control electronics needs to be replaced occasionally, but nothing should happen to the sand inside - like ever.

[idiotsecant]

'just' the piping, pumps, control systems, electrical system, valves, instruments...

The sand is the least complex part. Industrial facilities like this take a lot to keep running.

[JeremyNT]

I think the parent is suggesting that these things could be maintained in a cost effective way indefinitely. It's not like you hit year 50 and throw it away because of some inherent quality of the tech (as with nuclear plants or lithium batteries which fundamentally degrade in ways that are cost prohibitive to "fix").

The thing is, I'm unsure whether this holds true. Could you actually replace pipes inside a huge sand battery without bringing the entire thing offline? And at some point are you basically rebuilding it?

[csomar]

The battery (am assuming it's just sand and metal) should be very cheap compared to Lithium especially in the places where you generated solar energy (they are hot and have a lot of sand).

The problem is: is it profitable to even store energy there? There is no mention beyond "In operation, the sand battery has demonstrated a round trip efficiency of 90 percent.". That doesn't mean much if you do not compare it to Lithium and you don't give me a breakdown of the costs.

The other thing: Size. Is that big thing enough to store energy for a city? a neighborhood? A building? A house?

If it's enough just for a house, then I have trouble seeing this scale.

[kragen]

1 MW is enough to heat somewhere between 100 and 2000 houses, depending on other factors like insulation, climate, and house size.

[Sharlin]

It's right in the title. 1 MW/100 MWh.

[rsynnott]

If your house is consuming 100MWh in heating on any reasonable timescale, you, ah, have problems :)

[yencabulator]

But at least the problems will be short lived! Should reach self-ignition pretty quickly with that, even in the middle of Finnish winter.

[j45]

RoI is a fun one, anyone calling it out should be able to point out ROI as an example elsewhere that's accurate.

[echelon_musk]

What does MAGA have to do with Finland?

[conception]

Authoritarian populism support is rising globally.

[bslaq]

Posting a comment doubting the ROI of a public investment is not “authoritarian populism”. If anything, democracy needs more of it.

[Rebelgecko]

The problem is when it's based on bullshit, like the secretary of energy's recent claims that completely covering the earth in solar panels wouldn't be enough energy for our needs. Like his hypothetical Dyson sphere of solar panels, a lie on Twitter can make it around the world before the truth can catch up.

[bslaq]

The problem is this is Finland and whatever the secretary of energy of the USA says is completely irrelevant.

[y-curious]

Unfortunately, people seem to see Boogeymen everywhere when they're terminally online. It's kind of like the mid-2010s where everything someone didn't like was "fascist" or "Nazi"

[garciasn]

Populist strongmen are rising everywhere; this is a fact. The People have short memories and seemingly have forgotten those who rose to power in the first half of the 20th Century and whom the Americans fought against for the remainder of it.

Apparently now it's time for the world to return to populist authoritarianism and isolationist policy in order to bury our heads in the...sand...until we have to collectively rise against them again. Except, this time, it may be America who bears the brutal brunt.

[jagermo]

I find it fascinating that renewables always have to have a ROI.

nobody cares about his car loosing value as soon as you drive off the parking lot. Or any other appliance - a fridge will never have a ROI, a washing machine will not and neither will a stove, a macbook or a fancy smart home system. They are part of our live, loose value and we accept that.

But solar or batteries (granted, mostly with home-solutions)? Better make money, otherwise why even bother.

[rogerrogerr]

ROI is implicitly against the alternative or status quo:

- Fridge: has ROI vs. going to the store more often or getting food poisoning.

- Washing machine: Has ROI measured in the value of your time spent not slapping clothes against a board to make them clean.

- Stove: ROI vs. using and maintaining a fire pit, with the risk of burning your house down factored in.

- MacBook: ROI is how much work you can get done vs. a Windows machine, or not having a laptop and doing math really fast by hand on paper.

Etc. It is suspicious that there isn’t a “this will pay for itself in N years vs. not having it” statement somewhere.

[skrebbel]

Does anyone understand why people do this? I mean, really why? It's similar to eg climate protestors quoting all kinds of outrageously incorrect statistics as fact, or saying that $TECH can supply "4% of all households" with electricity, fully knowing that households only consume a tiny % of total energy, and so on.

I simply don't get it! The political landscape across the west is that there's swaths of people who've simply stopped believing mainstream media when they're reporting things, and somehow our reaction is to just lie even more? Try to out-lie camp Trump? I mean I don't think it's even possible to lie more than Trump so wouldn't the honest, nuanced truth be a a much better antidote than global left's current strategy of "also lie, but a bit less"?

I simply don't understand where it comes from. Like in what bizarro world is this shit a smart strategy? Is it all just incompetence?

[zahlman]

It has nothing to do with political partisanship (except to the extent that false-flagging happens or that powerful individuals have bad ideas about how to propagandize for their cause). Most people are just terrible at critical thinking, and most of the interesting claims (especially statistical ones) are simply not verifiable by random individuals.

Plenty of leftists have their own reasons to distrust media. But scarcely anyone imagines reasons why someone else would lose trust. Not that they could do anything about it anyway.

The "global left" is not a real thing. I mean, of course you can draw lines around groups any way you like, but this one doesn't offer meaningful insight.

[skrebbel]

Appreciate your response. I think I agree with all of it, great points.