Overview
Substituting fossil fuels with renewable energy sources will not be feasible without a massive ramp-up of seasonal energy storage.
SwissSTES builds on Switzerland's pioneering achievements in the field of large-scale seasonal thermal energy storage (STES). While hydro dams were the driving technology for electricity storage in the past, today, other forms of energy storage must be pursued for fast decarbonization of heat. STES is a key solution for the sustainable and cost-efficient realization of the required storage capacity. As of today, the importance of STES for improving the security of supply was overlooked, despite its large potential to reduce the dependency on fossil-fuel imports, maximise the integration of renewables and waste heat, help to reduce peak demand and close the winter electricity gap.
SwissSTES tackles the development and implementation of STES with a holistic approach and systematically explores STES opportunities such as available and unused cavities, aquifers and others and delivers novel STES technologies along with a systemic action and implementation plan for Switzerland. The highly interdisciplinary consortium closes the prevailing research and knowledge gap, bringing together all relevant stakeholders from academia, industry, and society to drive the innovation required for establishing STES as a sustainable and compelling approach in Switzerland.
New STES products, business ecosystems, legal frameworks, and socio-political measures are developed in close collaboration with industry partners, bringing STES to the next level of implementation. The regional case studies are setting the scene for the roll-out of large pilot and demonstration projects all over Switzerland.
The aim of this sub-project is to reuse the underground structure for STES. New approaches will be used to further develop STES insulation systems so that they can be applied to any spatial shape (i), to create cavity construction methods for STES in urban infrastructure projects and ensure long-term use in defined geological conditions (ii), and to define measures that allow stable stratification in tunnel geometries to keep losses low (iii).
