The availability of cost effective storage capacity is considered essential for increasing the share of renewables in electricity generation.
With the development of solar thermal power plants large thermal storage systems have become commercial in recent years. Various storage concepts are applied, systems using solid storage media are operated at a maximum temperature of 680 °C, other systems using molten salt as storage medium show thermal capacities in the GWh range. Heating these storage systems directly by surplus electricity and using the heat later during the discharge process to operate turbines is not very attractive, since the process is limited by the Carnot efficiency.
Alternatively, surplus electricity can be used to transform low temperature heat into high temperature heat which is stored in a thermal storage system during the charging process. During discharge, this heat is used to drive a turbine generating electric energy. Theoretically, this concept allows a roundtrip efficiency of 100%.
Various options for the implementation of this storage concept have been suggested, using air or CO2 as working fluids. Recently, DLR has demonstrated the operability of a latent heat storage system connected to a steam circuit at 100 bar. The availability of this latent heat storage technology allows new implementations of the storage concept based on heat transformation. Using a left-running Rankine cycle during the charging process, heat from the environment is used to evaporate steam, which is compressed using the surplus electricity. Superheated steam exiting the compressor flows through the thermal storage system composed of latent heat storage sections and sensible heat storage sections. After throttling, the water enters the evaporator again. During discharging, heat from the storage system is used to evaporate and superheat steam, which drives the turbine. A cascaded implementation of this concept, using ammonia for the low temperature part of the process, while water is used for the high temperature part, reaches a storage efficiency of 70%. The integration of low temperature waste heat sources allows the compensation of losses.
Study on Heat Storage and Transportation System for Recovering Non-using Low-temperature Heat