Siemens Gamesa commission its Energy Thermal Storage System (ETES) plant in Hamburg

The Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy SA has put into operation its 130 MWh electric thermal energy storage system (ETES) facility located in Hamburg, Germany.

The installation has a thousand tons of volcanic stone that store energy. It is fed with electrical energy converted into hot air through a resistance heater and an air insufflator, which heats the rocks up to 750ºC. During peaks of demand, ETES employs a steam turbine for the re-electrification of the stored energy. In this way, the ETES pilot plant can store up to 130 MWh of thermal energy for a week. In addition, the storage capacity of the system remains constant during load cycles.

This pilot project aims to demonstrate how this system is integrated into the network on a regular basis and to test thermal storage on a large scale. In the next step, Siemens Gamesa plans to use storage technology in commercial projects and scale storage capacity and power. The objective is to store energy in the range of several gigawatt hours (GWh) in the near future. One gigawatt hour is the equivalent of the daily electricity consumption of about 50,000 homes. 

This project, funded by the German Ministry of Economy and Energy, has been supported by scientists from the Thermofluid Dynamics Institute of the Technical University of Hamburg (TUHH) - which has been responsible for research on thermodynamic fundamentals - and the Hamburg Energie, a municipal energy supplier that, in addition to selling the stored energy, has developed a computer platform to which the installation is connected to guarantee the maximum possible benefit through an optimized use of storage.