RWE Power has announced that it is starting to develop a high-temperature thermal storage facility for combined-cycle gas turbine (CCGT) power plants. The project is to be taken forward in the next few years together with the companies ThyssenKrupp Xervon Energy, Paul Wurth Group and the Institut fur Technische Thermodynamik des Deutschen Zentrums fur Luft und Raumfahrt.
According to the company, the integration of such a storage facility into the power plant process enables the supply of electricity and heat to be decoupled timewise, the company said.
It said that the separation is currently not possible in CCGT power plants which are operated in the combined heat-and-power mode with the associated high degree of fuel utilization and low level of CO2 emissions.
The project development is expected to take approximately two and a half years. Once the development phases have been concluded successfully, the co-operation partners intend to erect a pilot facility with a capacity of 10MWh. The cogeneration plant of RWE Power in Dortmund could be the potential site from 2011, said the company.
Johannes Lambertz, CEO of RWE Power, said: We intend to widen the applications of efficient and resource-conserving cogeneration by deploying these power plants. Especially increasing, non-demand-driven capacities in the generation pool, for instance in growing offshore wind farms, impose greater flexibility requirements on our power stations.
