Name: Freezing cold? This town in Finland is keeping warm with sand • FRANCE 24 English
Uploaded: 2026-02-08T21:01:10.000Z
Duration: 2 min 12 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

the winters are cold and dark, with an average temperature of -10 degrees Celsius.

And yet, inside this school, it's T-shirts and stockinged feet.

You don't need any sleeves, or shoes at all.

It's very nice to be inside, and not feel cold at all.

The school, homes and everything in this 5,000 resident town belongs to a heat network.

Inside 100 tons of fine rubble from nearby building sites, chosen for its particular properties.

It's called soapstone, which can hold heat really well.

You don't need that type of sand that's in a shortage.

The battery is powered by electricity produced by wind turbines and solar panels, heating the sand to 500 degrees.

The sand then heats water, which is sent round the town's radiators.

And inside the silo, the sand stays hot for as long as a week,

solving the problem of how to store intermittently produced energy from renewable sources.

It offers a method to store large amounts of energy.

So we are constantly discharging and charging the system, so that we can always provide a steady stream of heat.

This new system replaces the centralized burning of wood, sourced from the vast Finnish forests.

The mayor anticipates the change will cut the town's carbon emissions by 70% and make them more self-sufficient.

Heated water from the sand battery comes here.

It circulates into the building and the used water is going back to the sand battery.

It will be recharged there and coming back heated.

So if the electricity is cut off, the heat is still there.

The radiator thermostat is set to 22 degrees all day long.

Cheap, renewable and effective, this technology could be scalable to much larger cities.