The potential of demand-side management in ATES systems

Abstract

The research described in this paper is focussed on the potential of marrying the concept of demand-side management with the Aquifer Thermal Energy Storage (ATES) system. This is done by adding a short-term thermal storage system in the form of a water tank to the system design called a buffer. A model was build based on measured data of existing ATES system to study the effects of adding a buffer to the ATES system.The result is that both the investment costs and the yearly energy costs can be reduced by 10% - 15%. The concept can be taken one step further by letting the system operation react to the prices on the imbalance market. In doing so, yearly energy costs can be reduced by as much as 35%