Heat supply through Solar Thermochemical Residential Seasonal Storage (Heat-STRESS)

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The Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) scheme encourages uptake of renewable heat technologies in the UK to support the ambition of 12% of the heating coming from renewable sources by 2020, and solar energy is one of the forms of renewable energy that has great potential. The amount of solar radiation incident on the roof of a typical home exceeds its energy consumption over a year. However, the longstanding barriers to the utilisation of solar thermal energy technology lie in the noticeable miss-match between energy supply and demand. The Heat-STRESS project aims to deliver the maximum benefits of solar thermal energy by means of short-term (diurnal) and long-term (seasonal) thermal energy storage and thermochemical heat transformer technology to significantly reduce energy demands for individual and/or multiple residential buildings, such as a local community or multi-storey development. The concept proposes to significantly advance phase change material (PCM) storage and thermochemical technology in a holistic system such that it has the potential to provide both a technically and economically viable solution. With sensible heat storage systems, the storage volumes required will be large and difficult to integrate into existing domestic dwellings. The latent heat storage has higher energy density than sensible heat system, and thermal-chemical thermal storage has much higher energy density than latent heat. Moreover, thermochemical sorption technologies seldom suffers from long-term heat loss and provide a preferable option for solar seasonal energy storage, i.e. using excess solar heat collected in the summer to compensate for the heat supply insufficiency during the winter time. One of the significant advantages of a thermochemical sorption system is that it is inherently an integrated heat pump and energy storage system. It is a pure heat-driven heat pump cycle and the heat source can be the seasonally stored solar energy, which would provide the potential to avoid electricity or gas use and off-peak grid loading resulting from the deployment of integrated air and ground source heat pumps, electric boiler, gas boiler and storage technology currently being developed. The thermal transformation provides the opportunity to upgrade heat, which may be suitable for domestic heating, so that it can provide higher temperature domestic hot water.The Heat-STREES project is aiming at a new high level of cutting-edge technologies despites with lower Technology Readiness Level. It should be envisaged with long-term vision: one of imperative measures to realise decarbonisation and to cut energy bills is to avoid the conventional generated electricity and gas consumption due to the continuously increasing demands, aggravating energy poverty and the forthcoming strengthened carbon taxes. In order to tap all appealing potential of thermal-chemical sorption and PCM thermal storage to make contribution for a better advanced world, more immediate collective efforts from both academia and industries is required to address important research issues.