Natural gas fired Combined Cycle (CC) power plants are currently the backbone of EU electrical grid, providing most of regulation services necessary to increase the share of non-programmable renewable sources into the electrical grid. As a consequence, Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) and Utilities are investigating new strategies and technologies for power flexibility. On the other hand, existing cogenerative CCs are usually constrained by thermal user demand, hence can provide limited services to the grid. At the same time, CHP plants are highly promoted for their high rate of energy efficiency (> 90%) and combined with district heating network are a pillar of the EU energy strategy. To un-tap such unexploited reserve of flexibility, and to further enhance turn-down ratio and power ramp capabilities of power oriented CCs, this project proposes the demonstration of an innovative concept based on the coupling of a fast-cycling highly efficient heat pump (HP) with CCs. The integrated system features thermal storage and advanced control concept for smart scheduling. The HP will include an innovative expander to increase the overall efficiency of the HP. In such an integrated concept, the following advantages are obtained: - the HP is controlled to modulate power in order to cope with the CC primary reserve market constraints; - the high temperature heat can be exploited in the district heating network, when available; low temperature cooling power can be used for gas turbine inlet cooling or for steam condenser cooling, thus reducing the water consumption; - in both options, the original CC operational envelope is significantly expanded and additional power flexibility is achieved. In general, the CC integration with a HP and a cold/hot thermal storage brings to a reduction of the Minimum Environmental Load (MEL) and to an increase in power ramp rates, while enabling power augmentation at full load and increasing electrical grid resilience and flexibility.

SPIRIT (Implementation of sustainable heat upgrade technologies for industry) will demonstrate three full-scale (>0.7 MWth) industrial heat pump systems that upgrade industrial waste heat to valuable temperatures (135-160°C). The demonstration covers sites in the paper & pulp and food & beverage industry, covering 63% of the potential high-temperature heat upgrade market. SPIRIT achieves technology scaling by designing modular heat pumps with standard components covering a large portion of the industrial heat upgrade market. The standard components allow a straightforward and cheaper manufacturing, thereby achieving improvement in economic performance. Compared to regular heat pumps, technical performance improvements of 30% are validated with advanced working fluids (zeotropic mixtures). SPIRIT will develop standard heat pump integration methods for industry to allow easier integration. New business models and contractual agreements for upgrading heat technology are developed considering single and multi-stakeholder environments, mainly through considering heat as a service. To ensure sufficient capacity is available to carry the innovation of SPIRIT, a competence framework is developed to identify which skills are needed (and missing) in the market. The missing skills are used as input for two summer schools, where SPIRIT will educate and train engineers, maintenance staff, and other critical enabling stakeholders. The learnings from the demonstrations, market analysis, technical and non-technical barriers analysis are captured and communicated to raise awareness of the challenges and benefits of heat pumps in the industrial sector. SPIRIT has a strong partnership consisting of technology suppliers, end-users, knowledge providers, business and market experts, and dissemination and knowledge transfer partners. A multi-sectoral advisory board guides the SPIRIT project and its partners with representatives of the district heating, chemical and refinery sector.

The CryoHub innovation project will investigate and extend the potential of large-scale Cryogenic Energy Storage (CES) and will apply the stored energy for both cooling and energy generation. By employing Renewable Energy Sources (RES) to liquefy and store cryogens, CryoHub will balance the power grid, while meeting the cooling demand of a refrigerated food warehouse and recovering the waste heat from its equipment and components. The intermittent supply is a major obstacle to the RES power market. In reality, RES are fickle forces, prone to over-producing when demand is low and failing to meet requirements when demand peaks. Europe is about to generate 20% of its required energy from RES by 2020, so that the proper RES integration poses continent-wide challenges. The Cryogenic Energy Storage (CES), and particularly the Liquid Air Energy Storage (LAES), is a promising technology enabling on-site storage of RES energy during periods of high generation and its use at peak grid demand. Thus, CES acts as Grid Energy Storage (GES), where cryogen is boiled to drive a turbine and to restore electricity to the grid. To date, CES applications have been rather limited by the poor round trip efficiency (ratio between energies spent for and retrieved from energy storage) due to unrecovered energy losses. The CryoHub project is therefore designed to maximise the CES efficiency by recovering energy from cooling and heating in a perfect RES-driven cycle of cryogen liquefaction, storage, distribution and efficient use. Refrigerated warehouses for chilled and frozen food commodities are large electricity consumers, possess powerful installed capacities for cooling and heating and waste substantial amounts of heat. Such facilities provide the ideal industrial environment to advance and demonstrate the LAES benefits. CryoHub will thus resolve most of the above-mentioned problems at one go, thereby paving the way for broader market prospects for CES-based technologies across Europe.