Borehole Thermal Energy Storage Systems for Storage of Industrial Excess Heat : Performance Evaluation and Modelling

Abstract: Improving industrial energy efficiency is considered an important factor in reducing carbon dioxide emissions and counteract climate change. For many industrial companies in cold climates, heat generated at the site in summer will not be needed to fulfil the site heat demand during this time, and is thus removed to the outdoor air. Although a mismatch between heat generation and heat demand primarily being seasonal, a mismatch may also exist at times in the winter, e.g. during milder winter days or high production hours. If this excess heat instead of being sent to the outdoors was stored for later use when it is needed, purchased energy for the site could be decreased. One way to do this is by the use of a borehole thermal energy storage (BTES) system.A BTES system stores energy directly in the ground by using an array of closely drilled boreholes through which a heat carrier, often water, is circulated. So far, BTES systems used for heating purposes have mainly been used for storage of solar thermal energy. The BTES system has then been part of smaller district solar heating systems to reduce the seasonal mismatch between incoming solar radiation and heat demand, thus increasing system solar fraction. For this application of BTES systems, energy for storage can be controlled by the sizing of the solar collector area. At an industrial site, however, the energy that can be stored will be limited to the excess heat at the site, and the possible presence of several time-varying processes generating heat at different temperatures gives options as to which processes to include in the heat recovery process and how to design the BTES system. Moreover, to determine the available heat for storage at an industrial site, individual measurements of the heat streams to be included are required. Thus, this must be made more site-specific as compared to that of the traditional usage of BTES systems where solar thermal energy is stored, in which case long-time historic solar radiation data to do this is readily accessible for most locations. Furthermore, for performance predictions of industrial BTES systems to be used for both seasonal and short-term storage of energy, models that can treat the short-term effects are needed, as traditional models for predicting BTES performance do not consider this.Although large-scale BTES systems have been around since the 1970’s, little data is to be found in the literature on how design parameters such as borehole spacing and borehole depth affect storage performance, especially for industrial BTES applications. Most studies that can be found with regard to the designing of ground heat exchanger systems are for traditional ground source heat pumps, working at the natural temperature of the ground and being limited to only one or a few boreholes.In this work, the performance of the first and largest industrial BTES system in Sweden was first presented and evaluated with regard to the storage’s first seven years in operation. The BTES system, which has been used for both long- and short-term storage of energy, was then modelled in the IDA ICE 4.8 environment with the aim to model actual storage performance. Finally, the model was used to conduct a parametric study on the BTES system, where e.g. the impact on storage performance from borehole spacing and characteristics of the storage supply flow at heat injection were investigated. From the performance evaluation it could be concluded that lower than estimated quantities and/or quality of the excess heat at the site, resulting in lower storage supply flow temperatures at heat injection, has hindered the storage from reaching temperatures necessary for significant amounts of energy to be extracted. Based on the repeating annual storage behavior seen for the last years of the evaluation period, a long-term annual heat extraction and ratio of energy extracted to energy injected of approximately 400 MWh/year and 20% respectively are likely.For the comparison of predicted and measured storage performance, which considered a period of three years, predicted values for total injected and extracted energy deviated from measured values by less than 1 and 3% respectively, and predicted and measured values for injected and extracted energy followed the same pattern throughout the period. Furthermore, the mean relative difference for the storage temperatures was 4%. A time-step analysis confirmed that the intermittent heat injection and extraction, occurring at intervals down to half a day, had been captured in the three-year validation. This as predictions would become erroneous when the time step exceeded the time at which these changes in storage operation occur.Main findings from the parametric study include that 1) for investigated supply flows at heat injection, a high temperature was more important than a high flow rate in order to achieve high annual heat extractions and that 2) annual heat extraction would rapidly reduce as the borehole spacing was decreased from the one yielding the highest annual heat extraction, whereas the reduction in annual heat extraction was quite slow when the spacing was increased from this point. Another conclusion that came from the performance evaluation and the parametric study, as a consequence of the Emmaboda storage being designed as a high-temperature BTES system, intended working temperatures being 40–55 °C, was that the possibility of designing the BTES system for low working temperatures should be considered in the designing of a BTES system. Lower storage operation temperatures allow for more energy to be injected and in turn for more energy to be extracted and reduces storage heat losses to the surroundings.