As the global energy system becomes increasingly electric – not just in power but transportation and heat, too – storing energy is going to play an ever more important role in ensuring that clean energy can be used when it is most needed.
To date, most of the focus has been on storing surplus power generated by solar and wind farms, using battery technology or pumped hydro-electric facilities. But there is also a huge potential in storing heat, or thermal, energy in a similar way. The market for heat storage is more than three times the size of the electricity storage market, at about $300 billion, more than 3 times the total market for utility scale electrical batteries, according to Aurora Research.