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Underground Large Scale Seasonal Energy Storage for Decarbonized and Reliable Heat

Project description

Breaking barriers to mass renewable energy integration

In a world grappling with the challenge of meeting IEA net-zero targets, the heating sector remains a stumbling block. Accounting for over a third of energy demand, it is heavily dependent on fossil fuels. Recognised as a game-changer for decarbonisation, district heating lacks effective large-scale seasonal energy storage solutions. With this in mind, the EU-funded USES4HEAT project will unveil two groundbreaking, cost-effective, and large-scale thermal energy storage units. These are set to transform district heating networks and industrial heat recovery. Through advanced drilling, innovative pipes, heat pumps, solar tech, and AI-based management tools, USES4HEAT promises a future of reliable, decarbonised heating with minimised environmental impact.

Objective

Today, the heating sector is not on track toward achieving the IEA Net-Zero targets: it represents more than a third of the energy demand and it mainly relies on fossil fuels. District heating is recognized as a major solution allowing decarbonization of the heating sector. The integration of large-scale seasonal energy storage, compensating for the mismatch between supply and demand whilst ensuring the service, is key for a wide spread of district heating. USES4HEAT aims to demonstrate innovative, large-scale, seasonal thermal energy storage solutions enabling a future decarbonized and reliable heating supply. USES4HEAT demonstrates, at TRL8 and for a one-year test campaign, two innovative, cost-effective, large-scale, seasonal underground TES units to maximize the availability and resilience of heating supply while reducing energy losses and environmental impact. USES4HEAT seeks to demonstrate the storages as fully integrated units in commercial large-scale district heating networks and industrial waste heat recovery and fulfilling industrial thermal demand. In doing so, USES4HEAT also demonstrates six innovative key enabling components/technologies and their integration with seasonal storages: advanced drilling equipment and remotely controlled machines halving drilling times, innovative layered high-temperature borehole pipes, efficient groundwater heat pumps integrated with aquifer storages, hybrid solar panels and thermal solar collector, and accurate AI-based energy management tools. USES4HEAT will systematically demonstrate the effectiveness and techno-economic-social viability of innovative, large-scale, seasonal energy storages ensuring limited CAPEX, reduced environmental impact and energy losses, efficient integration in district heating and accumulation of various sources of heat, and granting reliable and decarbonized heating supply.

Fields of science

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.

Coordinator

KUNGLIGA TEKNISKA HOEGSKOLAN
Net EU contribution
€ 668 290,00
Address
BRINELLVAGEN 8
100 44 Stockholm
Sweden

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Region
Östra Sverige Stockholm Stockholms län
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Total cost
€ 668 290,00

Participants (26)