Comparative life cycle assessment of thermal energy storage systems for solar power plants

Eduard Oró, Antoni Gil, Alvaro de Gracia, Dieter Boer and Luisa F. Cabeza

Renewable Energy, 2012, vol. 44, issue C, 166-173

Abstract: The present work compares the environmental impact of three different thermal energy storage (TES) systems for solar power plants. A Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) for these systems is developed: sensible heat storage both in solid (high temperature concrete) and liquid (molten salts) thermal storage media, and latent heat storage which uses phase change material (PCM). The aim of this paper is to analyze if the energy savings related to the stored energy of the different systems are enough to balance the environmental impact produced during the manufacturing and operation phase of each storage system. Some hypothetical scenarios are studied using LCA methodology to point out the differences between each TES system.

Keywords: LCA; PCM; Thermal energy storage; Solar power plant; EI99 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (43)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960148112000195
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:renene:v:44:y:2012:i:c:p:166-173

DOI: 10.1016/j.renene.2012.01.008

Access Statistics for this article

Renewable Energy is currently edited by Soteris A. Kalogirou and Paul Christodoulides

More articles in Renewable Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().