Advantages & Benefits of Heat Stores

Advantages of heat stores

Decoupling the production of energy with the need for its immediate use delivers a great deal of flexibility for the CHP plant owner, its customers on a district heating network and also the wider energy system.

The flexibility of heat infrastructure and its integration with sources of heat supply is further enhanced with the use of heat stores – or accumulators. These stores provide the flexibility to generate heat at the optimum time – for example when a CHP plant is called upon to generate power, when power production is most profitable, or when an industrial process is in operation – ready for use at a later time when consumers need it.

Heat storage enables electricity to be produced when it’s most needed and also when its generation is most profitable. The heat that is not needed during these production periods is then simply stored in the heat storage facility for use at a later time. As additional power generation capacity can be brought online efficiently within a matter of minutes, this function can prove very valuable in balancing peaks and troughs in overall power supply into the electricity network. This will become an increasingly important option as we substantially increase the amount of intermittent renewable energy we use over coming decades.

It also enables the CHP unit to operate more consistently at its maximum capacity, if even for a shorter period of time overall, which for many units is the most efficient mode of operation. Likewise, they can also reduce disruption associated with maintenance and upkeep of any CHP and district heating network.

Benefits of heat stores

Heat stores provide the following direct benefits:

• enabling CHP plant and other energy generation technologies to provide valuable ancillary support to electricity network, without loss of efficiency
• enabling CHP to generate electricity at the most commercially advantageous time, as determined by the electricity market, without loss of efficiency
• recovering energy from electricity that is generated in excess of system requirements, helping to balance the electricity system and maximising the value of ‘must-run’ electricity generators
• providing resilience and energy security to district heating networks

These in turn deliver a range of beneficial outcomes:

• much more efficient, reliable and responsive management of the overall supply of energy across the system as a whole
• higher levels of deployment of inflexible and intermittent power generators is made possible