So I read the actual source, rather than all the silly editorials.
https://www.loviisanlampo.fi/b...
Then I followed up on some of the links in it leading to relevant companies.
It's basically a sponsored grade local thing that seems to be done mostly for PR/environmental credits/environmental promises reasons for participants. 1MW hypothetical output, 100MWh potential storage. Thermal only, intended for remote heating. Blog breaks down project sponsors as follows:
Municipal government has their own net zero project, so they chipped in. Most of their main buildings are remote heated, so they also have investment in this working.
Region has a world's largest (according to them) manufacturing company for heat storing fireplaces (og. Finnish: varaava takka), and company that makes them has a lot of stone sand waste from making said fireplaces. They're providing the stone sand used plus some funding, and this gets them some "circular economy" certifications which makes their loans and credit lines cheaper in some cases.
Heating company basically says that this will let them stop using some of their thermal peaking stations, so they're projecting total removal of oil based peaker and significant reduction in wood chip burning peaker. They're also owned by an environmental investment focused fund and that one is chipping in for the costs.
Finally they're getting government subsidy from government's business fund.
I also suspect this is about the fact that 2/5 Finnish nukes sit in the same municipality that this central heating company operates out of, which leads to complexities of running heat peakers because of how electric grid has to be set up. Many if not most of the heat peakers are dual use, and provide heat as a secondary function of electricity production (i.e.you just add an additional circuit in a typical power plant, where some of the steam is directed into a separate heat exchanger to heat remote heating circuit contents of which are then pumped across remote heating network).
Overall, an interesting idea but seems like something that can be only really done on a very small level, and in very specific locations where they can easily source sand from that specific type of rock that is really good at reserving heat as some waste of a specific production line. Scaling is a very big question mark both in availability of this kind of sand, and in just how little heat you can actually get out of it (1MW maximum out of 100MWh capacity isn't great, and they're claiming very high efficiency (85-90% for smaller units) which seems rather high for what this is. I suspect they're only giving us efficiency of only some part of the system, rather than the whole thing.