Thermochemical energy storage by consecutive reactions for higher efficient concentrated solar power plants (CSP): Proof of concept

Concentrated solar power plants (CSP) combined with thermal energy storage (TES) offers the benefit to provide continuous electricity production by renewable energy feed. There are several TES technologies to be implemented, being the thermochemical energy storage the less studied and the most attractive since its volumetric energy density is 5 and 10 times higher than latent and sensible TES, respectively. Thermochemical energy storage technology is based on reversible chemical reactions, also named thermochemical materials (TCM). One of the main challenges of TCM is to achieve a proper reversibility of the reactions, which in practical conditions leads to lower efficiencies than the theoretically expected. A new concept based on changing from reversible TCM reactions towards TCM consecutive reactions aims to eliminate reversibility problems and therefore improve the overall efficiency. Consecutive TCM reactions can either be based in one cycle, where reactants are needed to feed the reaction, or two coupled cycles which offer the possibility to work without any extra mass reactants input. The plausibility of the implementation of both concepts in CSP is detailed in this paper and case studies are described for each one.The authors would like to thank the Catalan Government for the quality accreditation given to the research group GREA (2014 SGR 123) and DIOPMA (2014 SGR 1543). The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) under grant agreement n° PIRSES-GA-2013-610692 (INNOSTORAGE) and from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 657466 (INPATH-TES). Dr. Camila Barreneche would like to thank Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad de España for Grant Juan de la Cierva, FJCI-2014-22886