International Innovation Network for the Development of Cost- and Environmentally Efficient Seasonal Thermal Energy Storages

Future energy systems will integrate diverse, variable renewable energy sources to replace fossil fuels, use sector coupling and waste heat recovery, and interact symbiotically with a variety of users. Seasonal thermal energy storages (sTES) are existential for peak-shaving and load-shifting in these systems and they increase the usability of decentrally generated thermal energy. INTERSTORES aims to achieve successful market acceptance, technological attractiveness and competitiveness by improving performance, cost efficiency and increased reliability. By pooling engineering, (hydro-)geological, environmental, and applied disciplines as well as expertise from different sectors, 14 partners from 9 countries will ensure a high exploitability through technology transfer measures. For this, INTERSTORES promotes the full-scale realization of two different sTES variants. Two demonstrators address one crucial concept of versatile sTES solutions in European’s future energy systems: The combination of several tuneable sTES.Overarching goal is proving the international market potential of novel Reno-sTES and Giga-CTES by demonstration of highly favourable techno-economic and environmental performance. With the unique opportunity of full-scale demonstration, INTERSTORES’ innovations will close critical gaps for arriving at reliable facilites, robust operational functioning and replicable implementation. The two solutions will reveal crucial differences regarding optimal design, integration potential on different scales, operating conditions, costs, environmental impacts and benefits. Finally, INTERSTORES will not only demonstrate application of planned innovation modules for sTES to project’s demo sites, but set a major focus on maximizing their replication potential. This will be achieved by complementing technological and digital developments at the demos with research on European transfer sites, regional markets and new business opportunities.