Session: 09-01 Industrial Process Heat and Waste Heat

Paper Number: 116871

116871 - Green Heat for Industry: Least-Cost Off-Grid Energy Collection and Storage Options for Multiple Australian Locations 

The industrial sector is not only energy intensive – consuming nearly 54% of the total delivered energy in the world – but also requires steady and continuous energy supply at all times. Shifting industrial heating to renewable energy sources greatly reduce global CO₂ emissions. However, renewable energy sources, like solar and wind, are intermittent, and thus, it is important to develop systems that combine solar and/or wind energy with some form of energy storage. With many alternative options and combinations available, analysis is needed to determine the lowest-cost approach of these systems to supply decarbonised industrial processes with heat. In this study, several combinations of off-grid energy collection and storage are evaluated for constant-rate heat delivery of 500 MWth to a hypothetical industrial process. The evaluation is based on the levelised cost of heat and the continuity of the heat supply (the whole-system capacity factor, CF). The green heat options include concentrating solar thermal (CST) energy collection with molten salt thermal energy storage (TES), and solar photovoltaic (PV), wind or hybrid PV-wind collection with TES, pumped hydroelectric storage or battery storage. The electrical energy storage (EES) systems are assumed to provide heat via a resistance heater. Combustion of stored green hydrogen generated from PV, wind or hybrid-powered water electrolysers is also compared. Optimal systems configurations are examined for five industrial regions around Australia with differing solar and wind resources. Mainstream literature cost data is sued. Results obtained show that TES is the least-cost storage component across all sites, always cheaper than systems using EES. In systems with a strong solar resource but poor wind resource, CST-TES systems are dominant. LCOH at a CF of 95% from CST-TES is just 44 USD/MWhth in the Pilbara (a major iron ore mining region in Western Australia). Otherwise, hybrid PV-wind-TES systems are frequently preferable. In the Upper Spencer Gulf (near Adelaide), such a system reaches an LCOE of 52 USD/MWhth at a CF of 95%.

Presenting Author: John Pye Australian National University

Presenting Author Biography: John Pye (BSc BE PhD, Associate Professor at the Australian National University) is a mechanical engineer and researcher in solar-thermal energy, green industrial process design, techno-economics and process optimisation. He is curerntly the ANU lead investigator for the Heavy Industry Low-carbon Transition Cooperative Research Centre (HILTCRC), primarily in system modelling and technoeconomic analysis of hydrogen ironmaking and renewable process heat.