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Currently, there is an increasing interest in concentrated solar power (CSP) plants as alternative to produce
renewable electricity at large scale by using mirrors to concentrate the solar energy and to convert it
into high temperature heat. These facilities can be combined with thermal energy storage (TES) systems,
which are, nowadays, one of the most feasible solutions in facing the challenge of the intermittent energy
supply and demand. However, they are still in research process and, for that, there is a lack of environmental
impact studies of these TES systems complementing solar plants. This paper accounts the environmental
impact of three TES systems used nowadays in high temperature applications for CSP
plants: first, a system which stores sensible heat in high temperature concrete; second, a system storing
sensible heat in molten salts; and third, another system with molten salts but storing latent heat. All the
systems are normalised in order to be comparable between them due to its initial storage capacity difference.
The environmental impact is accounted by calculating the amount of embodied energy in the
components of the different TES systems. Notice that embodied energy refers to the total energy inputs
required to make a component. Between the three systems, the sensible heat system using concrete as
storage material is the one with less environmental impact while the molten salts and PCM have a higher
value of embodied energy, mainly due to the nitrate mixture used as storage material. Finally, advantages
and disadvantages of the method proposed used are discussed
The work was partially funded by the Spanish government (project ENE2011-22722). The authors would like to thank the Catalan Government for the quality accreditation given to their research group GREA (2009 SGR 534). The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under Grant agreement n PIRSES-GA-2013-610692 (INNOSTORAGE). Eduard Oró would like to thank the University of Lleida for his research fellowship. Laia Miró would like to thank the Spanish Government for her research fellowship (BES-2012-051861). |
