Going back to the first post in this thread (see quote below) I found out that a second power plant (about 200km away) has recently started to use a heat accumulator. This one is smaller (38m tall with 21m diameter) with a volume of only 12,000 cubic meters of water, but I found that its temperature range is between 54°C and 98°C, which means that it holds about 2210 GJ of useful heat energy (if my calculations are correct). From the info I could find, the cost of this accumulator was ~$5mln.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Piwoslaw
About 1-2 years ago the largest power plant in Warsaw decided to add a heat accumulator, already in use at many Skandinavian plants. It's basically a huge thermos which gets warmed up with waste heat during the day, relieving the night load. Or it can be heated at night the help generate electricity in the day. This is a VERY simple setup: just a 47m-high cylinder, 30m in diameter, holding over 30,000 cubic meters (30mln liters) of water. No extra machinery or heat exchangers, just an extra valve. Its heat capacity is 1300MW(thermal). The cost was about US$17mln. I can't find much info on it, nothing on how much it actually saves, but I did find out from an insider that the power plant is very happy with it. So much so that other plants are planning on building something similar.
|
EDIT: I just read that the power plant in Cracov also recently built a heat accumulator. This one has 20,000 cubic meters of water.