Energy Analysis of Molten-Salt Storage Integrated with Air-Based Brayton Cycle: Case Study of a Wind Farm in Denmark

Renewable energy sources like wind farms and solar farms have become very important in recent years. There are various methods for storing energy from these renewable sources. Molten Salt (MS) storage is a novel way to store excess electric power as high-temperature thermal energy from which it can be converted to any form of energy. In the present study, the excess power of a wind farm is stored in the MS storage as heat. This heat is converted to power using an Air-Based Regenerative Brayton power cycle (A-BRB) when needed. Also, some of this heat could be utilized to heat water for the district heating (DH) application. A numerical model is presented for a power storage system using transient data from a real wind farm in Denmark. The energy analysis is applied to the proposed hybrid system. The results concluded that the energy efficiency of the proposed system is about 26.1%. The total amount of MS that could be stored in the storage is about 1267 kg. also, the proposed system could produce about 140 MW during the discharging time of 3.5 hours. In addition, the system could produce 143 kg/s of hot water during the discharging mode.