A comprehensive study on energy storage technology for solar power application.

With advancement in technology, Energy Sector has seen a great shift in dependency from fossil fuel towards the renewable energy sources specifically among all the other sources of renewable energy, Solar has gained much attention due to its abundant availability. But due to stochastic behavior of the Solar energy, the power generated by solar energy is highly variable and affecting both the power quality and the power planning system. To reduce the effect of intermittent nature solar energy, Energy storage system(ESS) play a vital role in controlling the overall output from the generating system and providing other extending support towards the working of the system. This paper discusses the different variants of energy storage methods deployed with solar power and a comprehensive investigation is carried out on various storage technologies. The paper includes most of the energy storage technologies present in themarket such and Electrochemical Energy Storage, Pumped Energy Storage, Thermal Energy Storage, Compressed air Storage, flywheel energy storage, magnetic energy storage and hydrogen energy storage. The main objective of the article is the analysis of aforementioned storage technologies and their operating constrains as well as characteristics of various storage types. Based on literature survey it is found that most of the researches have been carried out around Sensible Heat Storage and Latent Heat Storage. Further Pumped Hydro storage is found to be the widely used technology in integration with renewable energy due to its operational and maintenance ease and lower impact on environment. The recent advancement in storage technologies and their deployment with solar power are also included in this paper throughout. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]