Comparative sustainability assessment of energy storage technologies in Qatar

Abstract

Energy storage is a supporting technology for the penetration of intermittent renewable energy systems. The State of Qatar is a hub of natural gas production and planning to increase the utilization of its abundant clean solar energy resources. The tendency towards clean energy utilization necessitates the retrofit of energy storage technologies (ESTs) to stabilize the electricity supply sustainably. The key objective of the current paper is to study comparatively the sustainability of ETS pathways after adapting to the conditions of Qatar through an optimization model. Three different scenarios were conducted to focus on the concept of economic feasibility through a cost-effective (CE) scenario, a sustainable (ST) scenario of a minimum of each storage cost, natural resource (water and land) use, and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The third stringent (STR) scenario is set with a constant GHG emissions constraint over different energy storage power. Qatar's daily energy storage demand is set in the range of 250–3000 MWh and could be fully (100 %) covered by the compressed air energy storage (CAES) pathway based on the CE scenario constraints. The ST scenario is satisfied by 79.21 % from flywheel energy storage systems (FESS), 20.75 % from CAES, and 0.04 % from pumped storage hydropower (PSH). The STR scenario constraints are fully met by CAES up to the daily demand point of 2500 MWh, after which PSH is merged by a range of 11.4 %–24.7 % to maintain the total GHG emissions from EST in Qatar constant at 924 t of CO2 equivalent.