Cold energy storage technology

It’s necessry to generate cold energy due to the temporal mismatch between cold
generation and usage, which could be eliminated by the cold energy storage systems. For
refrigeration, three types of cold storage media are commonly used: chilled water, ice and
phase change materials (PCMs).
Chilled water storage
It’s a constant source of water utilized to store the energy, chilled water storage could
influence on the performance of air cooled chillers, it can reduce the peak electrical load of
a chiller by up to 100% and decrease the nominal chiller size by up to 33% with the operating
strategy (experience of kuwait).
Ice storage
Ice is generated during off-peak hours and melts to provide cold energy during peak hours,
the ice storage system could reduce 55% of electricity consumption compared with the
conventional system. Ice energy storage has a large latent heat capacity of phase change
(334 kJ/kg) and low cost. However, it tsuffers from a melting point of 0 °C along with a
supercooling degree of 4–6 °C, resulting in an increase in energy consumption for lowering
the evaporation temperature of refrigerating systems
PCMs storage
For cold energy storage, the commonly used PCMs are organics (especially paraffin), salt
hydrates, and salt solutions. The most popular PCMs are organics, especially the paraffin,
which are commonly used for cold storage above 0 °C . The PCMs showed good
characteristics of charging and discharging, resulting in saving energy used for cooling and
ventilation.