Germany mulls turning old coal plants into thermal storage assets

Researchers in Germany are exploring possibilities to turn the country’s coal plants into giant thermal storage devices once they are no longer used for power production, Jason Deign writes on the GreenTech Media website. The German Aerospace Center (DLR) currently investigates whether the boilers in coal plants can be replaced with molten salt-based thermal storage systems that can be heated with excess renewable energy. “If the concept works, then advocates say it could help safeguard coal generation jobs while giving Germany tens of gigawatts of storage capacity for renewable energy load-shifting on the German grid,” Deign writes.

Achieving greater storage capacity is seen as one of the prime challenges Germany’s energy transition is going to face over the next years. A report by Bloomberg has recently found that Germany's power storage market reached a new record volume of more than 5 billion euros last year.