The 14th and 15th of January 2009, there was a workshop at the Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby with aims described by the workshop title “How ambitions can we be in contributing to the worlds energy needs with wind, solar and bio energy. – And what role does energy storage play?”

This was certainly a very interesting place to be and listen to experts, politicians and industries. At the workshop “solar energy” the experts in CSHP, Jan-Olof Dalenbäck, representing amongst other the European platform ESTTP (http://esttp.org), representatives from universities and two major players from industries Sten Beltman Jørgensen, Sunmark A/S (http://www.sunmark.com) and Jes Donneborg Arcon Solvarme A/S (http://www.arcon.dk). Backed up by others the target was to be defined for “solar thermal” including large solar.

Some remarks from the discussion show that even though CSHP have just a share of 1% of the collector area, the production share is at 9%, a Factor 9. This is due to size, efficiency and storage.

According to figures by Jan-Olof there are 30 central plants and 120 block and “small” plants at current times. As you will find in the coming future there are a number of plants under construction and planning.

It was discussed that subsidies schema do not support large-scale solar heating while supporting the small systems. It can be argued that subsidies are not necessary for CSHP due to the cost effectiveness for commercial plants. See the VEKS post below.

It was mentioned that there is a new project founded by the EU “SDH Take-off” probably Solar District Heating (SDH). You will find more on that topic later in this blog. (I could not find any through Cordis or Google – please help).

The method of the workshop was to define an ambitious target, uncover challenges which lead to a number of actions and from here a road map could be drawn. This work, over 2 days let to the following conclusion which was presented at the workshop: (my interpretation)

Pro-solar arguments are that you need 1 hour collection of all solar energy to supply the world with the total energy necessary. This ought to be possible. Solar produces 30-40 times the energy per area as biomass. The ambitious goal was defined at he the COP14 in Poznan, Poland to 50% of all heat demand must be supplied by solar heating in 2050. This target was than distributed over the period, not referred here.

The road map was laying out that all actions ought to start as fast as possible. Politicians ought to adopt the target (which they did i Poland). Next step ought to be public investments into maximum application of solar heating in public buildings, which would result in a) a stable marked condition for the industries and b) a critical mass for the production lines, assuming that marked conditions will lead to price-performance and competitiveness that brings along sustainability for the branch. A very important goal is than to increase the solar fraction of the technologies by improving/increasing the storage technologies. As another effort solar cooling would be investigated.

Please not that the workshop was also working with targets for other solar technology, education, wind and bio energy, plus energy storage.

I hope that other participants will be able to support by their descriptions and comments to this post or we will be able to supply with a proceedings or official summary by Risø. DTU, the organizers. Thanks to them. You may probably find it at http://risoe.dtu.dk

Next step will be COP15 – see http://www.cop15.dk/en

At the Eurosun 2008 in Lisbon, the thematic of large scale thermal storage was part of the topic range. Per Alex Sørensen from Planenergi, Denmark did provide me a copy of three papers that I refer here. Unfortunately, it seems that one cannot get the proceeding online. (This ought to be changed for any renewable energy and environmental conference, where proceedings ought to be open access and free for reading).

T. Schmidt and D. Mangold from the Steinbeis Research Institute, Stuttgart, Germany mailto:schmidt@solites.de did present a paper including three thermal storage projects, a 5,700 m3 water tank i Munich, a borehole storage 37,500 m3 volume in Crailsheim and a 4,500 m3 pit storage in Eggenstein.

F.Ochs, J. Nussbeicker-Lux at.al. presented the following abstract to their paper “Solar assisted district heating system with seasonal thermal energy storage in Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen” with the following abstract:

The solar assisted district heating system with seasonal thermal energy storage in Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen (Germany) is the first system realized with existing renovated buildings. The system consists of 1600 m² flat plate collectors and a 4500 m³ gravel-water thermal energy store (TES) for seasonal thermal storage. Experiences gained within the BMU-project “Further development of the pit heat store technology” contributed to the design of the seasonal TES. This paper focuses on the design and construction of the gravel-water store. The monitoring concept of the solar assisted district heating system with focus
on the gravel-water TES is presented.

Per Alex Sørensen, mailto:pas@planenergi.dk, from PlanEnergi, Leo Holm and Niels Aage Jensen from Marstal Fjernvarme, Denmark presented a paper “Water Storages, Solar thermal and Heat pumps in District Heatin” with the following abstract:

In 1996 Marstal Fjernvarme (Marstal District Heating) established 8.000 m2 solar collectors that covered 13% of the yearly consumption. The solar fraction in later built district heating plants goes up to 25% covering the total summer load, but several district heating companies especially natural gas fired combined heat and power plants want a higher solar fraction in order to replace expensive natural gas. Therefore new projects with solar fractions of 50% are designed and are expected to be implemented  in 2009. Design calculations show that the production price for heat from solar thermal plants with 50% solar fraction can compete with heat prices from natural gas fired CHP plants.

Dear all

The Ecostock proceedings is now available online. You find it at http://intraweb.stockton.edu/eyos/page.cfm?siteID=82&pageID=29

From these papers, I assume, you are able to find the status for the thermal storage technologies. I will probably try to find time to study the papers and review the status in a paper myself.

Good reading.

ECOSTOCK, 10 International Conference on Thermal Energy Storage, Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, 31.05.-02.06.2006. I could not find any proceedings. If anybody can help me with this, I would be delighted, please mail me. The conference is the latest in a longer series of very relevant knowledge exchange events regarding (thermal) energy storage research and technologies.

Previouse conferences, for searching where Jigastock, Megastock, and so on.