Author: LCC User

Renewable Energy Systems: Overview of Energy Use

Assessment: CASE STUDY

The Proven 6 kW wind turbine has been found to operate extremely reliably and works very well in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. By appropriate siting a loading factor of 40% can be achieved. This equates to an average of 1 unit of electricity for every hour of the year.
A major difficulty is that the energy produced is intermittent and rarely matches demand. One approach is to use battery storage, but a large storage capacity is required because there can be several days without significant wind and the batteries would have to store enough energy from windier days to cover this period, perhaps as much as 100 Units (kWh).
Hydrogen storage is also an option, but the technology is insufficiently developed and is difficult to make domestic applications feasible.
Another possibility is convert the wind directly to heat using thermal storage.
One interesting idea is to store the energy as compressed air. This is potentially very efficient.

Describe the principle of energy storage using compressed air. Compare the effectiveness of the technology with one of the below, with reference to the energy produced by the turbine.
Battery storage, e.g. lead-acid OR lithium ion
Hydrogen storage
Thermal storage
Factors you should consider should include:
Cost
Capacity
Efficiency
Physical size
Reliability
Scalability
Safety
Development potential (i.e. can the technique be improved)
You should produce a report detailing your findings. Conclude your report with a balanced assessment of the effectiveness of the technology.
The report should be about 1,500 words in length (excluding diagrams and appendices) and should be structured as follows:
Title page
Contents
Overview of the intermittency problem
Assessment of current solutions at a domestic level
Description of proposal that may lead to improvement
A comparison with another technology
Conclusion
References
Appendices

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