Cold thermal energy storage

Help your power systems support renewable energy resources with thermal energy storage

Cold thermal energy storage (CTES) can help utilities increase renewable energy production. CTES stores energy generated by solar or wind until it's needed by the utility.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison partnered with Slipstream to research CTES control strategies that maximize how much renewable energy can be used.

We discovered that if we pair CTES and appropriate chilling system control strategies, renewable energy utilization jumped from 10% to more than 50%. These results suggest that widespread implementation of CTES will boost renewable penetration for utilities.

We analyzed prototypes of a school and an office building in four geographic locations across the continental United States.

You can purchase the final report or check out Amy Van Asselt’s PhD thesis, "Operation of Cool Thermal Energy Storage to Enable Renewable Electricity Generation.”