"Best Innovation Award" for EU-project HEAVEN
To meet the climate goals of the Paris Agreement and become climate neutral by 2045, Germany needs to make its energy supply more flexible. The German Aerospace Center (DLR), Malta Hochtemperatur Wärmepumpen Stromspeicher GmbH (MHWS), Alfa Laval Mid Europe GmbH (Alfa Laval) and Siemens Energy Global GmbH & Co. KG (Siemens Energy) have received €6 million Euros in funding by the German Federal Ministry of Economics Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK) for the Store2REpower project to develop a competitive long-term storage system with 100 MW of electrical discharge capacity, an additional 70 MW of thermal discharge capacity and storage times of up to 100 hours.
The Store2REPower project
Germany needs to electrify its heating sector and to ensure that expanded renewable power generation is available on-demand and around-the-clock. The grant will fund a technoeconomic analysis of the potential for Malta’s LDES technology to help decarbonize both electricity and heat generation in Germany. It will also support the expansion of DLR’s world-leading test facility for thermal energy storage in molten salts (TESIS) to validate an innovative, Alfa Laval-built heat exchanger.
“We are honored to partner with the German government and its leading national laboratory, the DLR, to explore how Malta’s technology can accelerate the transition off natural gas,” said Ramya Swaminathan, CEO of Malta. “This important work will identify how best to meet Germany’s decarbonization goals, create jobs in German turbomachinery manufacturing, and deliver a just transition by creating clean energy construction and operations jobs for the nation’s current energy workforce.”
Sigmund Brielmaier, Head of LDES at Siemens Energy, states: “Besides being the turbomachinery supplier for Malta’s technology, we are keen to contribute with our expertise to this project that enables the energy transition. LDES is a key to decarbonize the energy system and this project offers a great opportunity to explore new ways of decarbonized combined heat and power applications.”
Prof. Dr. André Thess, Director of the Institute of Engineering Thermodynamics at DLR, said: „As a globally leading research institution in the field of molten salt technology the DLR-Institute of Engineering Thermodynamics will be happy to contribute to the successful development of this important large-scale long-duration storage technology”.
Tom Erixon, President and CEO of Alfa Laval comments: "Energy storage plays a pivotal role in driving the shift towards renewable energy sources. Alfa Laval is proud to be part of this significant project, poised to propel the solution implementation to new heights. Our pioneering and highly efficient heat exchanger technology, tailored for Malta's energy storage process, will be running in actual operational settings. It is a milestone in the pathway towards competitive, long-term energy storage and the transformation of the European energy market into a more sustainable future.”
The innovative pumped-thermal energy storage system
Malta’s innovative pumped-thermal energy storage (PTES) plant is a like-for-like replacement for fossil-fueled power plants. It generates 100-MW of clean power and 70-MW of clean heat, but it uses an industrial grade heat pump to replace the carbon emissions and volatile price of fossil fuels with zero-emissions, lowest-cost-available renewable energy. The heat pump converts the electricity to thermal energy, which can be stored for hours to days. When needed, a heat engine reconverts the thermal energy into clean power and heat, returning more than 90% of the original energy to the grid with little-to-no degradation over its 30+ year lifespan.
The key component of this storage system is being tested at the DLR facility TESIS (Test Facility for Thermal Energy Storage in Molten Salt). This is a new liquid-salt-air heat exchanger being developed by Alfa Laval. This heat exchanger is being tested at the power plant scale that will be required later. For the successful first demonstration of a 100 MW power plant, the prior qualification and measurement of the heat exchangers used in the TESIS plant is essential.
As an long-duration energy storage (LDES) asset, Malta’s technology allows utilities to reliably deploy vastly more wind and solar power without the risks of unavailability or wasting surplus generation. As a clean power plant, it delivers the same grid resilience and reliability services that fossil-fueled plants do but wind and solar do not. With among the best-available round-trip efficiencies, lowest system degradation, and longest plant life, Malta’s clean power and heat plant allows customers to make up lost ground on decarbonization goals.
DLR's contribution
In close collaboration with DLR’s Institute of Engineering Thermodynamics, led by Prof. Dr. André Thess, the partners will collaborate on analyses of:
- Use cases for long-duration energy storage in the electricity grid, including grid services, and heat grids;
- Suitable market mechanisms for long duration storage systems;
- Identification of sites for potential deployment; and
- Validation of an innovative Alfa Laval heat exchanger at DLR’s TESIS, the world-leading facility for high-temperature, molten-salt, thermal storage technology.