Comparative environmental life cycle assessment of conventional energy storage system and innovative thermal energy storage system

Abstract

As policies have been implemented globally to limit the production of greenhouse gases (GHGs) and the effects of climate change, the generation of electricity by renewable technologies has started to increase. The development of sustainable energy storage solutions has also become more important. The continued use of conventional chemical batteries presents environmental issues such as heavy metal pollution and the use of unsustainable resources. An environmental Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has been conducted to analyse the environmental impact of an innovative Thermal Battery (TB) and was compared with the impact of a Lithium Iron Phosphate Battery (LIPB) using a “cradle-to-gate” approach to establish the system boundaries. The study used the findings from existing literature to determine the environmental impact of the LIPB. The life cycle inventory for the TB was constructed based on a model and available literature. In this regard, the two products were compared on 10 impact categories, and the results indicated that the TB performed better in 8 categories on average. The highest impact observed from the TB was in terrestrial ecotoxicity, where it emitted above 7000 times more than the LIPB, amounting to approximately 0.0153 after normalisation. The highest normalised environmental load in the study was indicated to be in the category of marine ecotoxicity by the LIPB at 0.27, which was significantly higher than any load for the TB. Overall, the results obtained are encouraging for the TB, but it is recommended that a field study is completed to verify the assumptions made in this paper and to achieve a better comparability with studies conducted similarly.