More Incentives for Thermal Energy Storage for Night Time Wind

December 31st, 2010 by Susan Kraemer

Yet another city is offering incentives to homeowners to use thermal energy storage for night time wind power. As the percentage of wind power on the grid increases we may see more incentives to help store the excess with this kind of simple distributed energy storage.

Now the city of Summerside on Canada’s Prince Edward Island is asking homeowners to buy a special heating unit to help them store excess night time wind energy the city is producing. It is offering a break on their electricity bills in return.

Because wind in the region blows more at night, when the demand is lowest, wind farms can wind up selling at a loss, or even giving away power at those times.

The need for storage for wind power is great. Most of the storage being considered is at the utility scale. But ceramic block thermal heating units in homes can turn a night time energy excess into another valuable form of energy for use in cold climates. Heat.

Currently Prince Edward Island is selling about 15 per cent of the energy from its wind turbines to the mainland, because it cannot use all the electricity generated locally, because most of the power is generated at night. Like the 100% wind powered island of Vinalhaven in Maine, which had the same problem, it wound up having to sell its night time wind power excess at lower rates.

So, to solve the problem, at a recent council meeting, the city announced a new program asking homeowners to buy a special, ceramic space heater that is set to receive night time wind electricity, store it as heat, and release the heat slowly over 24 hours. The heaters use high-density ceramic bricks. This type of thermal energy storage is already in use in homes in the UK to even out peak demand on its electricity grid.

City administrator Terry Murphy said the heaters are really no different than a furnace.

“The demand for the heat can be adjusted as you do today. In other words, you can set your thermostat at certain levels. It will be no different with this here,” said Murphy.

The heaters cost about $2,000 each, but they save money over the long term, due to the low price of off peak power. But savings over the long term frequently is not enough to move people to act. So to encourage homeowners to step up to help even the grid, the city is offering an extra break on electricity prices, in hopes of getting at least 100 residents to invest in one of the heaters in 2011.

“We’re looking at about $600 a year that could be beneficial to the consumer,” said Murphy.

Image: HomeDesignFind

Related stories on thermal energy storage for night time wind:
Maine Residents Get $6,000 to Store Wind as Slow Heating
Is Distributed Thermal Storage Next?
100% Wind-Powered Island off Maine

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About the Author

Susan Kraemer writes at CleanTechnica, CSP-Today, PV-Insider , SmartGridUpdate, and GreenProphet. She has also been published at Ecoseed, NRDC OnEarth, MatterNetwork, Celsius, EnergyNow, and Scientific American. As a former serial entrepreneur in product design, Susan brings an innovator's perspective on inventing a carbon-constrained civilization: If necessity is the mother of invention, solving climate change is the mother of all necessities! As a lover of history and sci-fi, she enjoys chronicling the strange future we are creating in these interesting times. Follow Susan on Twitter @dotcommodity.

Harryroper

My sister and her family lived in a cottage on the east coast of Scotland for ayar about 25 years ago. Their heat was partly an electricly heated box of bricks with a cover and maybe a fan. There is nothing new about this idea.
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Larry

A better way of storing this surplus electricity as thermal energy may be with large-scale underground thermal energy storage (UTES) that could be part of district heating systems or for large buildings or building complexes. I think this would provide better economy of scale, and more importantly allows inter-seasonal energy storage.

There are two types of UTES: in aquifers (ATES) as open-loop systems and in borehole fields (BTES) as closed-loop systems. ATES works only in particular geological situations, but BTES can be done essentially anywhere (e.g. from unconsolidated sediments to hard rock). A very large UTES can store thermal enery for even several months with only a small energy loss.

Paybacks can be quite short: often 4 to 6 years, and 10 to 12 years on the long side.

Also, UTES can be used for storing either cold or heat, such as puttng away winter’s cold for use in summer, and storing waste wind power any time of the year for use in the heating season.
- T
  
  It is possible, but costs much money and if you count it it may cost much more than the present project.