Many industrial plants require a constant supply of heat over long periods. If one relies on wind and solar energy, one must compensate for their fluctuations. Thermal batteries can help with this. Large systems, such as those used in industry, utilise sand or stones, for example, as a storage medium. The battery converts electricity into heat, stores it and makes it available when needed. When a lot of electricity is being generated, thermal batteries can absorb this energy, which would otherwise have to be curtailed, for example due to a grid bottleneck. On behalf of the company Zinq , GES has investigated how and under what regulatory conditions thermal batteries can be deployed in an economically viable manner.
Click here for the background paper by Ulrich Begemann and Thomas Frewer.
