Techno-economic study on nuclear integrated liquid air energy storage system for responding renewable energy

Abstract

The proportion of renewable energy generation is increasing in countries around the world to reduce Green House Gas emission. However, due to the intermittency of renewable energy, existing baseloads are expected to operate flexibly in near future. This dissertation proposes a nuclear-integrated liquid air storage system (LAES) for flexible output control of nuclear power plants. For the conceptual design and performance evaluation of the nuclear-integrated LAES, the secondary side of nuclear power plants was first modeled, and it is shown that the operation of the primary system was maintained while the power output changes when the LAES is coupled. Based on this, performance evaluation on the LAES cycle is performed through a quantitative evaluation factor called round-trip efficiency and confirmed that it has a efficiency of 51% and a high energy density of 116 kWh/m3. In addition, the Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCOE) was evaluated and it is confirmed that integration with nuclear power plant is more economical than using LAES alone. In addition, a new concept of LAES is proposed, which uses compressed nitrogen to replace propane and methanol for cold energy storage, and it is shown that it performs better than the conventional LAES layout.