I read an article, which I cannot find now, that said that water heaters can be retrofitted to provide a more cost effective energy storage system when compared the electrochemical battery storage systems. Basically, excess renewable energy would be used to heat water in residential water heaters. But, I don’t understand how the energy is later extracted for use or if it was only for the purpose of providing hot water.
In: Engineering
>But, I don’t understand how the energy is later extracted for use or if it was only for the purpose of providing hot water.
If the system uses hot water as a storage mechanism then it will simply just function to provide hot water when needed. Basically this would just be a system where you heat up the water when electricity is cheap and then save it for your later hot water needs. So this is a electricity to thermal battery.
There are electricity to electricity thermal batteries too, but these operate at very high temperatures because then you can extract the energy by superheating stream which can be put into a turbine to generate electricity. Typically this is done by heating objects like rocks to thousands of degrees.
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