Experimental assessment and prediction of short-term aquifer thermal energy storage for energy demand-side management applications

Groundwater heat pump (GWHP) systems are now widely used for space heating and cooling and domestic hot water production. On one hand, GWHP systems are considered as a renewable energy and on the other hand, their increasing use impacts electrical grid balancing. Since the coupling of electrically-driven heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems with thermal energy storage (TES) is seen as a promising tool for demand-side management (DSM) in the low-voltage grid, experimental validation of aquifer thermal energy storage (ATES) capabilities at demand side management (DSM) frequencies (real time, intraday, interday, and interseasonal) is needed for the sector to adopt it.
We demonstrated here that hourly to daily ATES can be efficient in terms of energy recovery rate and exergy whereas weekly to seasonal ATES bears the risk of lower recovery rates and presents almost always low exergy. Moreover, energy recovery rates are improved with the increasing use of storage and recovery cycles. To formulate this demonstration, we emulated the operating conditions of GWHP systems with ATES in several well-characterized experimental pilot sites in Wallonia. The standardized experiment we used to estimate the different hydrodynamic parameters and energy recovery at the pilot sites was based on push/pull tests with the injection of heated water, its storage for different DSM periods, and finally its recovery. Fluxes were either measured in-situ by means of the finite volume point dilution method or estimated with the local hydraulic conductivity and gradient. We report here a direct relationship between the energy recovery rate and natural groundwater fluxes.