Wind

Wind farms are unreliable in regards to production and need storage to supply when production fails. On the other end of the challenge, large wind farm has, at times, superfluous amount of electricity in relation to market demand. This can be bridged with storage. The storage can be placed close to the source or close to main users (industry, cities). The current technology is such that electric heating can be applied directly within the storage, thereby avoiding any heat loss at this transition stage. Alternatively, electricity can be used to heat an electric boiler which in turn supplies heated steam to the storage. This is an extra expense which normally would not be as attractive as direct electric heating.

The main benefits of the storage would be:

• More reliable delivery of power
• Increased power capacity in demand periods
• Reduced needs for power transmission capacity

There is, however, a major challenge with intermediary storage of electricity as heat. There will be unavoidable and significant loss of energy when converting this back to electricity via turbines and generators. How large this loss is depends on operating temperature, but typically one may account for more than 50 percent loss. This loss may be mitigated in case of storing superfluous electricity that creates low or no revenues and one can use waste heat for heating or industrial usage. The key matter of this concept is that the increased value of storage in terms of delivery reliability and delivery of power when the market needs is higher than the loss factor.

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