HEAT STORAGE

Thermal energy storage (TES) is achieved with greatly differing technologies that
collectively accommodate a wide range of needs. It allows excess thermal energy
to be collected for later use, hours, days or many months later, at individual
building, multiuser building, district, town or even regional scale depending on the
specific technology. As examples: energy demand can be balanced between day
time and night time; summer heat from solar collectors can be stored
interseasonally for use in winter; and cold obtained from winter air can be provided
for summer air conditioning. Storage mediums include: water or ice-slush tanks
ranging from small to massive, deep acquifers contained between impermeable
strata; shallow, lined pits filled with gravel and water and top-insulated; and
eutectic, phase-change materials. Other sources of thermal energy for storage
include heat or cold produced with heat pumps from off-peak, lower cost electric
power, a practice called peak shaving; heat from combined heat and power (CHP)
power plants; heat produced by renewable electrical energy that exceeds grid
demand and waste heat from industrial processes.

Solar Energy Storage

Most practical active solar heating systems have storage for a few hours to a day's
worth of energy collected. There is a growing number of facilities that use seasonal
thermal energy storage (STES), enabling solar energy to be stored in summer
(primarily) for space heating use during winter.
Molten salt is now in use as a means to retain a high temperature thermal store, in
conjunction with concentrated solar power for later use in electricity generation, to
allow solar power to provide electricity on a continuous basis, as base load energy.
These molten salts (Potassium nitrate, Calcium nitrate, Sodium nitrate, Lithium
nitrate, etc.) have the property to absorb and store the heat energy that is released
to the water, to transfer energy when needed. To improve the salt properties it must
be mixed in a eutectic mixture.
In the higher latitudes, solar heat supply is significantly greater in summer
than in winter, yet the demand for heat is greatest in winter. Therefore the
maximum benefit from solar heat requires heat storage for at least 3 months, say in
hot water in an underground enclosure. To consider this possibility, we estimate the

time, tloss, for such a heat store to have 50% of its content withdrawn while
maintaining a uniform temperature Ts. Assume that the immediate environment,
e.g. the soil temperature, has constant temperature Ta. The heat balance
equation is
mc dTs/dt = - (Ts-Ta)/R
where mc is its heat capacity, and R is the thermal resistance between the
store and the surroundings.

Heat storage in hot rocks, concrete, pebbles etc

Water has one of the highest thermal capacities Heat capacity - 4.2J/(cmK)
whereas concrete has about one third of that. On the other hand concrete can be
heated to much higher temperatures 1200C by e.g. electrical heating and
therefore has a much higher overall volumetric capacity. Thus in the example
below, an insulated cube of about 2.8m would appear to provide sufficient storage
for a single house to meet 50% of heating demand.
Ice-based technology
Air conditioning can be provided more efficiently by using cheaper electricity at
night to freeze water into ice, then using the cool of the ice in the afternoon to
reduce the electricity needed to handle air conditioning demands. Thermal energy
storage using ice makes use of the large heat of fusion of water. One metric ton of
water, one cubic meter, can store 334 million joules (MJ)
Cryogenic energy storage
This uses liquification of air or nitrogen as an energy store. A pilot cryogenic
energy system that uses liquid air as the energy store, and low-grade waste heat to
drive the thermal re-expansion of the air is used.
Molten salt technology
Molten salt can be employed as a thermal energy storage method to retain thermal
energy collected by a solar tower or solar trough so that it can be used to generate
electricity in bad weather or at night. The system is predicted to have an annual

efficiency of 99%, a reference to the energy retained by storing heat before turning
it into electricity, versus converting heat directly into electricity.