A High-Temperature Carnot Battery for Enhancing Nuclear Power Plant Flexibility: Steady-State Performance Assessment and Transient Discharge Characterization

Carnot batteries (CBs) offer an appealing alternative to saturated pumped-hydro facilities and electrochemical batteries dependent on critical raw materials. A concept recently highlighted in the literature is that of coupled CBs, in which the discharge cycle of a CB interacts directly with the power cycle of a thermal power plant. Such configurations show promising gains in performance, cost, and responsiveness. However, their dynamic behavior remains insufficiently characterised, restricting assessment of the grid services they could realistically deliver. This work examines an innovative architecture in which a nuclear Rankine cycle is coupled to a CB to enhance operational flexibility. Following the preliminary system sizing, a detailed numerical analysis is performed using the CATHARE-3 thermal–hydraulic code to characterize the overall steady-state performance and transient behavior during CB discharge. The results show that the high-pressure turbine acts as an effective filter, absorbing most disturbances introduced by the CB. A refined breakdown of inertial contributions within both the Rankine cycle and the CB enables the identification of the most sensitive components. Finally, under these preliminary sizing assumptions, the coupled system exhibits high performance and would be capable of meeting the primary frequency control requirements during discharge operation, suggesting that coupled CBs constitutes a promising solution for providing fast frequency-regulation services to the electrical grid.