Experimental investigation on solar photovoltaic driven cool thermal storage system for the development of sustainable micro grid in building sectors

Abstract

In most of the developed nation, the increase in percentage share of renewable power in the total power generation causes major concerns over the integration of these renewable power with the grid resulting grid instability. Energy storage is a new frontier technology which is considered as the ultimate solution in developing smart micro grid with distributed renewable energy (RE) generation. Most of the hot countries like India spend nearly 24% of the electricity generated on air conditioning and food preservation. Under such scenario, among the various types of storage systems, the cool thermal storage plays a vital role to promote renewable power in an economical way. Considering the importance in the present increasing RE scenario, in the present work, an experimental investigation was performed on a cool water storage integrated with a chiller system driven by solar PV unit which has major advantages in central air conditioning system for demand management strategies and to solve the Grid instability. The results revealed that with the installation of 100 W chiller operated by a 200 Wp solar PV panel it is possible to generate 25 liters of cool brine at – 6C from 35C along with the storage of 0.405 kWh and 0.1 kWh of electrical energy in the battery respectively during the months of May and September. In the month of January the temperature was brought down only to a temperature of 1.3C along with 0.234 kWh of energy stored in the battery. These results will be very useful for the design and development renewable based micro grid for cooling and other applications which are electrically driven in various building sectors.