Performance Evaluation of Compressed Air Energy Storage Using TRNSYS

The appreciable economic growth in some of the developing countries like India in the recent years, towards providing energy security causes large environmental impact. Renewable Energy(RE) is being seen as one of the important means to meet the growing power needs of the economy while enhancing energy security and providing opportunities for mitigating greenhouse gas emissions. However, RE sources are highly intermittent in nature. The variability of these sources has led to concerns regarding the reliability of an electric grid that derives a large fraction of its energy from these sources as well as the cost of reliably integrating large amounts of variable generation into the electric grid. Hence at this juncture, it is necessary to explore the benefits of suitable Energy storage technologies. Compressed air energy storage(CAES) is a commercial, utility-scale technology that provides long-duration energy storage with fast ramp rates and good part-load operation. It is a promising storage technology for balancing the large-scale penetration of renewable energies, such as wind and solar power, into electric grids. Considering the potential of CAES storage, the present work, a thermodynamic model is developed with suitable assumptions and the simulation analysis is performed using transient system simulation(TRNSYS) v17 software. The system performance is compared by considering the recovery during the heat of compression using a thermal storage system and without considering the heat recovery. The overall turnaround efficiency of the system without considering the thermal energy storage(TES) system is 57 % and with TES system the efficiency is increased to 70%.