Impact of optimal sizing and integration of thermal energy storage in solar assisted energy systems.

It is becoming increasingly important for human societies to use renewable energy. More effective energy storage solutions are crucial to increase the share of renewable energy in the domestic and industrial sectors, which consumes a large amount of thermal energy for heating and cooling purposes. There has been little quantitative analysis of thermal energy storage in solar-based cold production units. An efficient method of designing heat and/or cold storage systems and smart operation planning can help a cooling/heating system to be smaller for the same capacity of supply and thereby reducing the costs of initial investment and costs of operation. This paper attempts to show how the size of a heat and cold storage system affects its thermal performance and how it can lower costs and emissions. For this, a solar-assisted thermally driven cooling supply system with various designs and integrations of their cold storage unit is simulated dynamically through a whole year in Qassim region as the case study. The results show that a system design with double solar heat storage and double cold storage in parallel arrangement results in the best techno-economic-environmental performance. For this case, the levelized cost of cooling will be 383 USD/MWhr, which will be at least 3% lower than the typical hot/cold buffer tank design scenario. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]