Abstract
As the number of renewable energy sources connected to the grid has increased, the need to address the intermittency of these sources becomes essential. One solution to this problem is to install energy storage technologies on the grid to provide a buffer between supply and demand. One such energy storage technology is Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES), which is suited to large-scale, long-term energy storage. Large scale CAES requires underground storage caverns, such as the salt caverns situated in the Cheshire Basin, UK. This study uses cavern data from the Cheshire Basin as a basis for performing an energy and exergy analysis of 10 simulated CAES systems to determine the exergy storage potential of the caverns in the Cheshire Basin and the associated work and power input and output. The analysis revealed that a full charge of all 10 caverns could store 25.32 GWh of exergy, which can be converted to 23.19 GWh of work, which requires 43.27 GWh of work to produce, giving a round trip efficiency of around 54%. This corresponds to an input power of 670.07 GW and an output power of 402.74 GW. The Cheshire Basin could support around 100 such CAES plants, giving a potential total exergy storage capacity of 2.53 TWh and a power output of 40 TW. This is a significant amount of storage which could be used to support the UK grid. The total exergy destroyed during a full charge, store, and discharge cycle for each cavern ranged from 299.02 MWh to 1600.00 MWh.
Highlights
To address climate change and limited fossil fuel resources, renewable energy technologies such as solar panels and wind turbines are increasingly being installed onto power grids
25.32 GWh of exergy, which can be converted to 23.19 GWh of work, which requires 43.27 GWh of work to produce, giving a round trip efficiency of around 54%
This section is split into two parts: The first presents the total exergy stored, the work and Round Trip Efficiency (RTE) of each component, and the exergy destroyed by each set of components
Summary
To address climate change and limited fossil fuel resources, renewable energy technologies such as solar panels and wind turbines are increasingly being installed onto power grids. It is likely that renewable sources will become the dominant source of power in the near future. Increasing the amount of renewable energy sources connected to the grid causes challenges that must be met. Renewable energy sources tend to be intermittent in nature, and it is difficult to match supply with demand. Energy Storage (ES) technologies present a solution to this challenge by allowing the generation and consumption of power to be decoupled. Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES) is one such ES technology
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