Aquifer Thermal Energy Storage (ATES) smart grids: Large-scale seasonal energy storage as a distributed energy management solution

Vahab Rostampour*, Marc Jaxa-Rozen, Martin Bloemendal, Jan Kwakkel, Tamás Keviczky

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

27 Citations (Scopus)
193 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Aquifer Thermal Energy Storage (ATES) is a building technology used to seasonally store thermal energy in the subsurface, which can reduce the energy use of larger buildings by more than half. The spatial layout of ATES systems is a key aspect for the technology, as thermal interactions between neighboring systems can degrade system performance. In light of this issue, current planning policies for ATES aim to avoid thermal interactions; however, under such policies, some urban areas already lack space for the further development of ATES, limiting achievable energy savings. We show how information exchange between ATES systems can support the dynamic management of thermal interactions, so that a significantly denser layout can be applied to increase energy savings in a given area without affecting system performance. To illustrate this approach, we simulate a distributed control framework across a range of scenarios for spatial planning and ATES operation in the city center of Utrecht, in The Netherlands. The results indicate that the dynamic management of thermal interactions can improve specific greenhouse gas savings by up to 40% per unit of allocated subsurface volume, for an equivalent level of ATES economic performance. However, taking advantage of this approach will require revised spatial planning policies to allow a denser development of ATES in urban areas.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)624-639
JournalApplied Energy
Volume242
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2019

Bibliographical note

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.

Keywords

  • Aquifer Thermal Energy Storage (ATES)
  • Distributed energy management
  • Distributed probabilistic energy management
  • Distributed stochastic model predictive control
  • Large-scale seasonal energy storage

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