Almacenamiento termoquímico de energía a alta temperatura para centrales solares de concentración: una revisión crítica

Abstract

Thermal energy storage, known as TES, allows detaching

the energy production from the demand. TES is especially

appropriate to be used in concentrated solar power plants,

where the energy is produced as heat. TES systems can be

classified in three different technologies: sensible heat storage,

latent heat storage and chemical heat storage. Currently,

commercially available TES systems are based on sensible heat

storage using molten salt stored in a double tank system. The

other two technologies present a theoretical higher energy

density but they are not mature yet to be commercially

implemented. Among these systems, thermochemical heat

storage has attracted the attention of the research community

during the last decades and start to present promising results

at relevant scale. The extremely high energy storage density

and operation temperatures opens the door to a powerful and

dynamic way of storing thermal energy for the plants of the

future operating at higher temperatures. In this paper a review

of the main experimental results concerning thermochemical

energy storage for concentrated solar power plants is

presented. A comprehensive review of metal oxides and redox

reactions has been included, considering that the operation

temperatures and the possibility of using natural air as the

heat transfer fluid turns this approach into a very interesting

solution for a new generation of concentrated solar power

plants.