Through a research and development support of 11.9 mio. DDK, the Danish government pushes for CSHP with seasonal storage. In charge for the project is Planenergi, the most active consulting company in the business together with the plant owner, Dronningelund District Heating. The overall concept will be to use solar heating in combination with a large scale thermal storage and a heat pump. The collector area is planned to be approx. 35,000 square metres, a storage volume of 60,000 m³ and a heat pump with 3 MW effect.

The seasonal storage is planned as a pit water storage with floating lid, a well-known solution applied in the past.

The overall budget for the project is 80 mio. DDK or approx. 10.1 mio. Euros.

We keep an eye on this project at this blog.80

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.

Congratulations to Samsø Green Island pioneer Søren Hermansen. He’s one of the “Heroes of the Environment 2008″ by Times Magazine. Source: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1841778_1841782_1841789,00.html.

One of the achievements are the central solar heating plan in Nordby. The solar plant of 2,500 m² solar collector supporting a chip wood plant with a 800 m³ thermal storage. You find more information on the plant and all the many other efforts on the Green Island at http://www.energiakademiet.dk/front_uk.asp?id=73.

Congratulation to the whole community of Samsø – well done.

According to the Danish Engineering Newspaper “Ingeniøren”, the Danish consultancy firm behind most of the Danish CSPH, Rambøll, is on it way with a new plant in South Korea. Source: http://ing.dk/artikel/91267?nyhedsbrev.

The plant will support 100 green houses by a panel area of between 200,000 and 500,000 m², reducing the CO₂ emission by approx. 100,000-200,000 tons a year.

The plant will involve heat pumps and heat storage.

Ikea applies heat pump with bore hole storage for heating. The goal is to supply 100% of the heat demand by renewable energy sources by 2012. The plant in Karlstad, Sweden, coveres 85 procent of the heat demand for the 24,000 m² warehouse by the heat pump storage system. Additional systems are planned in Malmö, Uppsala and Helsingborg.

Ikea’s bore hole storage in Karlstad, Sweden (Foto: Ikea)

The system consists of 101 bore holes with a distance of 5.5 m and a depth of 120 m, sizing the capcity of 1,200 kW. In winter electrical heating is necessary to meet the demands. The system has an impact of 2,200 CO2-reduction.

These storage types are developed for district heating in combination with solar heating, recovering the storage with solar energy during summer.

Source: http://ing.dk/artikel/85149?nyhedsbrev

The IEA – International Energy Agency – has been working on energy storage for years. You find the activities at a dedicated homepage for the Energy Conservation through Energy Storage (ECES) group at www.iea-eces.org. You find historical data on finalized energy storage projects but more important the tasks, called annexes, that are active.
Annex 15 Distributed Generation and Electrical Energy Storage (still pending)
Annex 16 Deployment of Energy Storage(PCM and UTES) 2006-2007 (planned)
Annex 18 Transportation of Thermal Energy by TES 2006-2009 (planned)
Annex 19 Optimized Industrial ProcessHeatand Power Generation by TES 2006-2008 (planned)
Annex 20 Sustainable Cooling by TES 2006-2007

It seems that things are going very slow and under planing. Could we please do better?

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.