New concrete-based thermal storage offers industrial efficiency

Energy Nest, a Norwegian company specializing in high-temperature thermal energy storage, offers a new way to save large amounts of energy disappearing as waste heat after use in industrial operations.

The company’s thermal energy storage ensures that this widely untapped energy reserve can be converted effectively. Once stored, the time-shifted waste heat can be used in a variety of ways, such as provide process steam, generate own power or stabilize entire power grids.

It comes with many advantages, but the main one being a significant increase in resource efficiency.

Consequently, industrial operations become environmentally friendlier. Industrial retrofits not only lead to a better energy balance, moreover such projects have short project paybacks making it economically very attractive.

One element of this new technical solution is the Heatcrete which is a high performance concrete composed of 75% quartz aggregates and 25% additives.

A steel carrier structure encloses Heatcrete-embedded carbon steel pipes, through which a heat transfer fluid is charging and discharging the storage system at a pressure of up to 160 bar.

A single module, fitting into a standard 40-ft container, provides an energy capacity of up to 2 Mwh(megawatt hours) thermal.

Due to its modular structure, this system can be scaled up into the Gwh (gigawatt hour) range.

It is by far cheaper compared to other energy storage technologies – at around US$20 to US$25 per Kwh (kilowatt hour), which is a fraction of battery costs.

Due to its rigid structure and no moving parts, the storage system works virtually maintenance-free, so that operating costs are a fifth of what other storage systems require.

The potential for own power generation via time shifted waste heat is tremendous. Companies can, for example, avoid peak price tariffs with their own waste-heat-to-power installation.