Liquid Air Energy Storage as a polygeneration system to solve the unit commitment and economic dispatch problems in micro-grids applications

Storage technologies play a crucial role in polygeneration plants that attempt to integrate power, thermal and cooling energy systems in order to maximize process efficiency and reduce operating cost. With the increasing penetration of renewable energy into the plant, storage technologies help to dampen the intermittency problem in their energy supply whilst at the same time perform peak shaving to reduce primary energy consumption, thus mitigating pollutant emission. Among the various storage technologies, Liquid Air Energy Storage (LAES) have gathered research interest due to its capability of simultaneously producing electrical and cooling power. Furthermore, unlike Electrochemical Energy Storage (EES) technologies, the LAES lifetime is not heavily dependent on its duty cycle, thus allowing for a calendar life twice or thrice that of EES. In this paper, the economic dispatch of an Eco-building in Singapore has been evaluated using a mixed-integer quadratic programming solver by comparing the adoption of EES and LAES within a capacity range of 300kWh-2000kWh. At the higher end of the capacity range, the LAES configuration results in a higher Net Present Value after 20 years and a shorter time period to obtain the Return of Investment compared to that of EES. At the lower capacity range, both technologies give similar financial returns. Analysis of the results show LAES to be a promising technology to compete with EES in the context of a polygeneration plant and further technology integration is discussed.