As more and more of the energy in Europe are produced from renewable fluctuating sources as wind and solar, there's an increasing demand for being able to decouple production from consumption.
In order to balance the electricity grids, the consumers should ideally only consume when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining. This is not feasible, as consumption is driven by daily routines, habits and weather that are independent of the production.
So in order to fix the issue, we should be able to store excess production to use it during the hours where there's no production.
Storage is the solution to make this decoupling, and there are several different approaches:
- Centralized vs. decentralized
- Electrical vs. thermal
In this project we're focusing on creating a decentralized thermal storage system.
We focus on decentralized storage, as it will also benefit the distribution networks, when we are able to schedule the consumption of electricity.
We focus on thermal storage, as 80% of the energy used in the households are used for heating and hot water. And thermal storage is a simpler and cheaper approach than electrical storage.
Our system is comprised of these individual components:
- A 15kWh thermal storage module in a compact design that fit in the space utilized by the oilburner we're replacing.
- A cloud connected controller that monitor all vital parameters of the heating system and building.
- A cloud platform that is able to forecast ideal production based on supply and demand of energies, as performance of heat pump at different outside temperatures.
- A heat pump that's integrated with the thermal storage and heating system in general.
- A heat distribution unit that is able to produce domestic hot water on demand, as well as mixing the ideal temperature for the central heating system of the building.
When a large number of SUNTHERM SmartHeat systems become installed throughout different markets, we gain the advantage that 'Energy Aggregator Companies' can take control of a pool of systems, and offer load balancing services back to the Transmission System Operators (TSO) and Distribution System Operators (DSO).
Ultimately; the more SmartHeat systems become installed in the grid, the less likely it is that we need to upgrade the distribution grid, and thus we can avoid large investments.
