On Monday, the Danish minister of education and research, Tommy Ahlers, attended the official inauguration of a giant pilot facility that will use 600 degree hot stones to store energy. Speaking to dr.dk, he said: “This could be the missing link in our renewable energy transformation.” (It’s arguable whether there really is a missing link, but that’s another story.) High-temperature thermal energy storage (HT-TES) is the technical term. The basic concept of the project is that cheap, non-degradable, and environmentally friendly storage materials combined with known charging and discharging technology can reduce the cost and increase the efficiency of energy storage.
Imagine a big box of small black stones, the size of an IKEA warehouse, insulated on all sides, very big, but very easy to build. The idea is that when excess energy is produced by intermittent renewable sources like wind and solar, this energy is used to pump very hot air into the stone storage, where the energy in the form of heat can be stored for many days with very little loss on average. The process is reversed by forcing the hot air out of the storage, which in turn creates steam from water to drive electricity-generating turbines and produce hot water for district heating.
For future theoretical storage in Denmark, the technical university DTU has identified storage needs of 10% of 1.4 GW baseload in 2035: 830 hours per year at full capacity (>300 MWh stored and released on average per day). Storage requirements are equivalent to 1 storage solution of 1.227 million cubic meters (e.g. 600 by 200 by 10 meters). The storage solution can be virtually invisible in the surroundings.
Energy company SEAS-NVE and the technical university DTU have built a small-scale test facility of this grand idea in collaboration with partners at Risø Campus, including Aarhus University, Danish Energy, Energinet.dk, EUDP (who has supported the project with research funding), and Rockwool. Niras has contributed to the work of constructing the plant. To Ritzau, Tommy Ahlers said:
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