HP-MOSES Publications

The following papers will be presented at the ECOS 2018 - 31st International Conference on Efficiency, Cost, Optimization, Simulation and Environmental Impact of Energy systems that will take place in Guimarães, Portugal, on June 17 through 22, 2018:

-"High-temperature supercritical air heat pump for large-scale thermal energy storage systems" R. Masci, C. Toro

-"High-temperature heat pumps for large scale energy storage application" R. Masci, E. Sciubba, C. Toro

The two participating SMEs are Technosind S.r.l. and GA Energy Spa

Project Coordinator:

Technosind S.r.l.

TECHNOSIND S.r.l. was founded in 1990 to coordinate the RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT activity, mainly in the innovative materials sector, the recovery of raw materials and renewable energy.
TECHNOSIND S.r.l. registration code to the National Research Registry is 60281C94.
The company’s main activity is process development from lab scale to full industrial scale.
Technosind’s expertise is attested by a full and qualified international experience. Since its foundation, Technosind has successfully collaborated in several important projects financed by the European Union (PRECLAYR BRITE-EURAM BRE2-CT92-0247 project BE-5551, project UE QUARZTREAT UE contract BRPR-CT96-0156). Furthermore, it has been, until 2007, the coordinator for the European project AITEKIN COOP-CT-2003-506667 “Combination of AI techniques and software with advanced reactor equipment for efficient kinetics analysis in the chemical industry”. During the project development, Technosind has coordinated the activities of the large enterprises involved such as Polimeri Europa (ENI - IT), UOP (UK) and others. For its work in this project, the company received the best possible rating from the EU commission (good to excellent project). On October 1st 2015, Technosind has also completed the European project EUREKA E3895 LILIEX “Removal and recovery of metals from waste using innovative liquid-liquid extraction processes” (Project coordinator: ENEA Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development).
Currently (2015 and 2016) Technosind has been developing projects, on behalf of Green Promotion S.r.l., in the following fields: molten salts thermal energy storage; catalytic fixation of CO2 with electrolytically produced H2 (Sabatier’s synthesis) and the study of the proprieties of nanostructured electrodes, on behalf of Eco Recycling Srl. It is also collaborating as a sub-contractor in the LIFE+ PHOTOLIFE “Process and automated pilot plant for simultaneous and integral recycling of different kinds of photovoltaic panels” project, which will end in August 2017.

Technosind mainly deals with projects regarding the following activities:

Research and Development activity coordination
Experimental plant layout
Statistical data analysis
Modeling and simulation
Scale-up for lab to pilot scale
Pilot plant design (all the way to full industrial scale)
Industrial experimentation
Technical and economic feasibility analysis

Most of the corporate revenue comes from Research and Development activity commissioned by private companies (such as Mining S.p.A., Procter and Gamblel, S.I.V., C.S.M. S.p.A.) and by public agency (such as CNR, Università dell’Aquila, ecc.)
Currently Technosind is undertaking collaborations with the University of Rome “Sapienza” and with innovative ESCO companies (GA S.p.a., Gea S.r.l., Green Promotion S.r.l.) mainly in the energy accumulation and nanotechnology fields.

The responsible for the HP-MOSES project for Technosind Srl is Dr. Claudia Toro.
At present Claudia Toro works in Technosind Srl as scientific and administrative collaborator for the development of R&D activities in the energy sector.

Participant:

GA Energy Spa

Founded in April 2015, GA Energy S.p.a. is a UNI CEI 11352-certified ESCO (Energy Service COmpany) licensed to trade EECs and Black Certificates.

EEC (Energy Efficiency Credits) are negotiable securities that certify energy savings in energy end-use achieved by means of projects and measures aimed to increase energy efficiency, while Black Certificates are negotiable securities that certify the reduction of CO2 emissions achieved by companies. All transactions relating to CO2 as a commodity, characterized as a currency or other financial instruments deriving therefrom, form the so-called Carbon Market.

An ESCO is a company that undertakes measures aimed to improve energy efficiency by taking on the risks of the project being implemented, thus freeing the final client of any organizational and investment responsibility. The payment for the services provided depends on the improvement of energy efficiency obtained as well as on compliance with other performance criteria set in advance. Certified ESCOs can finalize agreements with clients and suppliers, carry out energy diagnosis and financial assessments, draw up business plans, handle the permit issuance procedures, provide and/or find funds, give training. ESCOs are currently mostly specialized in energy efficiency and projects/installations for accruing White Certificates related to air conditioning, biomass plants, solar panels, low enthalpy geothermal resources, cogeneration and lighting. ESCOs carry out energy diagnoses, feasibility studies and project designing; they search for funding and carry out project implementations. In addition, they can also take care of operation and maintenance services (O&M).

GA Energy is also specialized in the application of feed-in tariff schemes for heat generation (“Conto Termico”) in the public sector, which is an instrument aimed to promote energy efficiency and the use of renewable sources for heat generation.

The company has enriched and expanded the know-how built by its founders in the energy and environmental fields. A combination of cross-sectional, multidisciplinary experiences has led to the development of the company in its current organizational structure.

GA Energy’s mission is to provide operational applications of the guidelines in the field of environmental protection that are being developed on a global scale. The first completed project involved the installation of two mini wind turbines (60kW) in the Municipalities of Potenza and Biccari (Foggia, Italy).

GA Energy collaborates with the University of Rome “Sapienza” through its spin-off CAESAR (Center for Advanced Energy Systems Analysis) for advanced research activity in the energy field, focusing its research especially on the reduction of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere.

The responsible for the HP-MOSES project for GA Energy S.p.a. is Dr. Roberta Masci.
At present, Roberta Masci works in GA Energy S.p.a. as junior project engineer and scientific collaborator for R&D activities in the energy sector.

HP-MOSES TEAM

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THE PROJECT

ABOUT US

TESTIMONIALS

CONTACT

The developed project addresses the challenges expressed in the Call - Horizon 2020 dedicated SME Instrument 2016-2017 Topic - SMEInst-09-2016-2017: Stimulating the innovation potential of SMEs for a low carbon and efficient energy system by proposing a new energy storage solution that is expected to contribute in decarbonising and making more flexible and efficient the European energy system. The main objective of the project have been the technical and economic feasibility analysis of an innovative large-scale (50-1000 MW) thermo-electrical molten salt energy storage system based on high-temperature heat pumps (HP-MOSES).

The renewable net generation in EU countries has been progressively growing in recent years. In particular, since 2013 the shares of wind and solar energy have been increasing until reaching the 9.3% and the 3.1% of the total European net generation. These trends of growing shares of variable renewable energy sources in the European electricity grid are expected to continue in future years in order to reach the 20-20-20 climate and energy European targets and the EU transition to a competitive low-carbon economy by 2050. In this scenario, energy storage systems are considered a key technology for enabling the progressively higher degrees of integration of variable renewable sources in the grid. In particular, the main functionalities of transmission grid-bulk storage on a national and European level are: balancing demand and supply (seasonal/weekly fluctuations, large geographical unbalances, strong variability of wind and solar), grid management (voltage and frequency regulation, complement to power plants for peak generation, participate in balancing markets, cross-border trading) and energy efficiency (better efficiency of the global generation mix, with time-shift of off-peak into peak energy).

The proposed storage system can be considered a promising alternative to current technologies for widespread and large-scale electricity storage. Compared to PHS and CAES, HP-MOSES system has the great advantage to be free from geological and geographical constraints (site-independent) with a low environmental impact and present a large scalability. In the European scenario, despite the urgent need, commercial site-independent alternatives with performance and cost comparable to PHS and CAES are not available.

The proposed TEES (Thermo-Electrical Energy Storage) system consists of three main sections: a high-temperature Heat Pump (HP) (charging section), a molten salt Thermal Energy Storage (TES) system (storage section), and a steam Rankine cycle (discharging section). Its working principle is that during periods of excess electricity generation, the high-temperature HP converts surplus electricity into thermal energy (charge phase), which is stored in a molten salt hot tank. During periods of high electricity demand, the stored heat is converted back into electricity in the steam Rankine cycle (discharge phase).The plant acronym is HP-MOSES (Heat Pump Molten Salt Energy Storage system) and its basic concept layout is shown in Figure 1.

While the molten salt thermal storage and the power block (Steam Rankine cycle) are established technologies, the proposed innovation stands in the high temperature (Tmax ≥ 350°C) solar assisted supercritical heat pump. Currently, industrial heat pumps work at maximum temperatures around 120°C, so that reaching such high temperatures keeping a high Coefficient of Performance (COP) has been a technical challenge. Within recent years, various TEES concepts using low-temperature heat pumps were developed with different working fluids and thermodynamic cycle designs for small-scale applications. Although some demonstration projects were planned, none of them has been already realized. Unlike these concepts, the proposed HP-MOSES system is aimed at high-temperature applications for large-scale energy storage, where the involved power is of the order of 50-1000 MW and the storage duration of the order of 4-16 hours.

Overall objectives of the project

Main results

The goal of the feasibility study of the HP-MOSES storage system was to identify and select the heat pump configuration that would provide the best trade-off between technical performance and economic viability (low system complexity) linked to the boundaries of the specific storage concept.

Using the environment as the low-temperature heat source, a number of heat pump designs have been investigated with regards to the achievable round-trip-efficiency, defined as the ratio between the total electrical energy output and the total electricity input, for different working fluids (CO2, refrigerants, Air and Argon), processes (transcritical/supercritical) and system layouts (regeneration vs. non-regeneration). The selected configuration was the Supercritical-recuperated Air cycle since it represented, for the same round-trip-efficiency, the simplest solution in terms of plant installation complexity. The cycle operative parameters have been then optimized to maximize the round-trip-efficiency.

The main technical and economic features of the optimized HP-MOSES system are summarized and compared to competitive large-scale energy storage technologies in Figure 2.

Once fixed the HP-MOSES configuration, two operational strategies have been defined, the Overnight Storage and the Daytime Storage, that can be respectively adopted depending on which kind of plant the HP-MOSES system is integrated into, as described in Figure 3. Each strategy can provide a combination of the most common energy storage generation/bulk services and a full cost-benefit analysis is required to establish which option is the most suitable for the power system of any European country. The two strategies have been matched to a specific market segment according to the following considerations: the Daytime storage strategy is applied in the first market segment (European countries where VRES>20%) because of the higher share of VRES generating surplus electricity, while the Overnight storage addresses the second segment (VRES>10%) in order to provide support to power system stability.

Germany and Italy have been selected as target markets for each segment since, despite their low VRES share in national generation compared to that of other countries belonging to their segment, they both have the largest VRES installed capacity and the highest number of fossil-fuel power plants. The economic feasibility of the proposed application was evaluated in accordance with the main methods of economic and financial evaluation of investment projects: the recovery period (payback period) and the evaluation of profitability actualized in terms of Net Present Value (NPV) and Internal Rate of Return (IRR). To account for the variations of surplus electricity purchasing price and of the CO2 EUA in ETS, a sensitivity analysis of the HP-MOSES annual revenues for Italy and Germany is performed. In the German case in order to have revenues, the buying and selling price difference must be enough to compensate the energy lost during the thermodynamic cycles of the storage system. Therefore, since the storage system has a round-trip efficiency equal to 0.55, the maximum price at which electricity can be bought is 55% of the selling price. For the Overnight storage, applied to Italy, different scenarios have been investigated varying the discharging hours, which affect the amount of saved coal. Then, fuel savings have been quantified for different coal prices projections.

The case studies demonstrated the strong potential of the proposed technology, which has proven to be competitive with respect to the other existing large-scale storage solutions.