The launch of Swedish firm Azelio’s thermal energy storage system in Morocco was marked with an inauguration ceremony on 5 March.
The 26kWh— comprising of two 13kWh systems— installation at the firm’s Noor Ouarzazate solar complex follows a joint technical and business development agreement between Azelio and the Moroccan Agency for Sustainable Energy (MASEN).
Verification of the storage will be initiated this month, with commercial installations later the same year, followed by volume production in 2021.
Jonas Eklind, CEO and president of Azelio, told BEST: “Our system is mainly designed for providing dispatchable electricity 24 hours a day in decentralized installations where the end-user is close to the installation. Technically we can install systems from 100kW of electricity and any larger size but typical projects are between 500kW and 2+MW of nominal electricity power. The storage capacity is always for 13 hours of nominal output but you can of course also run the system at part load and produce for many more hours than 13.”
The company has executed extensive in-house tests of the system, and an industrial version of the system, with two 13kWh modules, has been running in Sweden since December 2019.
The system uses recycled aluminium as a storage medium because the greatest energy recovery is obtained in the conversion phase. It’s scalable from 100kW to 100MW.
Azelio’s Thermal Energy Storage (TES) heats a Phase Change Material (PCM) to 577°C and liquefied in the container. During discharge, heat is transferred from the PCM through a heat transfer fluid (HTF) to the Stirling engine. A working gas is heated and cooled-off by ambient air, which runs the engine.
