Exergo-Economic and Environmental Analysis of a Solar Integrated Thermo-Electric Storage

Abstract

<jats:p>Renewable energies are often subject to stochastic resources and daily cycles. Energy storage systems are consequently applied to provide a solution for the mismatch between power production possibility and its utilization period. In this study, a solar integrated thermo-electric energy storage (S-TEES) is analyzed both from an economic and environmental point of view. The analyzed power plant with energy storage includes three main cycles, a supercritical CO2 power cycle, a heat pump and a refrigeration cycle, indirectly connected by sensible heat storages. The hot reservoir is pressurized water at 120/160 °C, while the cold reservoir is a mixture of water and ethylene glycol, maintained at −10/−20 °C. Additionally, the power cycle’s evaporator section rests on a solar-heated intermediate temperature (95/40 °C) heat reservoir. Exergo-economic and exergo-environmental analyses are performed to identify the most critical components of the system and to obtain the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE), as well as the environmental indicators of the system. Both economic and environmental analyses revealed that solar energy converting devices are burdened with the highest impact indicators. According to the results of exergo-economic analysis, it turned out that average annual LCOE of S-TEES can be more than two times higher than the regular electricity prices. However, the true features of the S-TEES system should be only fully assessed if the economic results are balanced with environmental analysis. Life cycle assessment (LCA) revealed that the proposed S-TEES system has about two times lower environmental impact than referential hydrogen storage systems compared in the study.</jats:p>

LCA and Exergo-Environmental Evaluation of a Combined Heat and Power Double-Flash Geothermal Power Plant

“…Auxiliary equations are also necessary if the number of unknown variables in Equation (6) is greater than one [35]. Auxiliary equations are applied using Fuel and Product principles, following consolidated rules of exergo-economic analysis [35,38]. The environmental balance equations are given in Table 11.…”

Life Cycle Assessment of Sensible, Latent and Thermochemical Thermal Energy Storage Systems for Climate Change Mitigation – A Systematic Review

“…Estimation of the environmental impacts of a solar-integrated thermo-electric energy storage (TEES) system was conducted by [36]. Considering its operations, since this TEES system is powered by solar PV, the overall environmental burden drops during the months of high solar radiation; i.e., from June-August, it was 202.84 Pts/MWh, while it dropped to 122.59 Pts/MWh during May-September due to powerful radiation.…”

Life Cycle Assessment of the Use of Phase Change Material in an Evacuated Solar Tube Collector

“…It is necessary to store solar energy in order to increase the efficiency of its use under conditions of randomly changing heat demand. The possibility of heat storage is a key economic aspect of increasing the share of renewable energy sources [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20]. One way to mitigate the limited possibilities of heat storage is to use the sensible heat and latent heat of water with Energies 2021, 14, 4146 2 of 18 phase change materials (PCMs).…”

“…Whereas, there are few studies that examine the ecological aspect of solar systems based on the vacuum tube technology. There are studies that investigate the life cycle of solar collectors; however, the majority of them are based on Embodied Energy (EE) and Embodied Carbon (EC) along with USEtox and Ecological Footprint (EF), or life cycle cost analysis [16,18,20,27,28,54,63,65,68,73,[75][76][77]. Few studies consider the LCA methodology for a perspective based on actual pollutant for impact assessment individually with a single score [59,78,79].…”