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Developing Cryogenic Energy Storage at Refrigerated Warehouses as an Interactive Hub to Integrate Renewable Energy in Industrial Food Refrigeration and to Enhance PowerGrid Sustainability

Project description

Balancing the grid and cooling refrigerated warehouses: efficient cryogenic energy storage

Thermal energy storage has received a lot of recent attention enabling harvesting of waste heat and its use either to produce electricity or to meet heating needs. Cryogenic energy storage (CES), the utilisation of cryogenic (ultra low-temperature) liquids to store energy, is also gaining attention. It can help balance a power grid increasingly dependent on renewable energy sources (RES), while also meeting the cooling demands of, for example, refrigerated food warehouses. Until now, however, its use has been limited due to low efficiency. The EU-funded CryoHub project aims to maximise CES efficiency with air as the cryogen, solving existing challenges, and paving the way to broader adoption of CES-based technologies.

Objective

The CryoHub innovation project will investigate and extend the potential of large-scale Cryogenic Energy Storage (CES) and will apply the stored energy for both cooling and energy generation. By employing Renewable Energy Sources (RES) to liquefy and store cryogens, CryoHub will balance the power grid, while meeting the cooling demand of a refrigerated food warehouse and recovering the waste heat from its equipment and components.
The intermittent supply is a major obstacle to the RES power market. In reality, RES are fickle forces, prone to over-producing when demand is low and failing to meet requirements when demand peaks. Europe is about to generate 20% of its required energy from RES by 2020, so that the proper RES integration poses continent-wide challenges.
The Cryogenic Energy Storage (CES), and particularly the Liquid Air Energy Storage (LAES), is a promising technology enabling on-site storage of RES energy during periods of high generation and its use at peak grid demand. Thus, CES acts as Grid Energy Storage (GES), where cryogen is boiled to drive a turbine and to restore electricity to the grid. To date, CES applications have been rather limited by the poor round trip efficiency (ratio between energies spent for and retrieved from energy storage) due to unrecovered energy losses.
The CryoHub project is therefore designed to maximise the CES efficiency by recovering energy from cooling and heating in a perfect RES-driven cycle of cryogen liquefaction, storage, distribution and efficient use. Refrigerated warehouses for chilled and frozen food commodities are large electricity consumers, possess powerful installed capacities for cooling and heating and waste substantial amounts of heat. Such facilities provide the ideal industrial environment to advance and demonstrate the LAES benefits.
CryoHub will thus resolve most of the above-mentioned problems at one go, thereby paving the way for broader market prospects for CES-based technologies across Europe.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

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Topic(s)

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Funding Scheme

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IA - Innovation action

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Call for proposal

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(opens in new window) H2020-LCE-2014-2015

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Coordinator

LONDON SOUTH BANK UNIVERSITY LBG
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 2 364 410,99
Address
BOROUGH ROAD 103
SE10AA London
United Kingdom

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Region
London Inner London — East Lewisham and Southwark
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 2 364 410,99

Participants (18)

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