Key Challenges for High Temperature Thermal Energy Storage in Concrete—First Steps towards a Novel Storage Design

Thermal energy storage (TES) allows the existing mismatch between supply and demand in energy systems to be overcome. Considering temperatures above 150 °C, there are major potential benefits for applications, such as process heat and electricity production, where TES coupled with concentrating solar power (CSP) plants can increase the penetration of renewable energies. To this end, this paper performs a critical analysis of the literature on the current and most promising concrete energy storage technologies, identifying five challenges that must be overcome for the successful exploitation of this technology. With these five challenges in mind, this paper proposes an approach that uses a new modular design of concrete-based TES. A preliminary study of the feasibility of the proposed system was performed using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) techniques, showing promising results.