| Title | Investigating Aquifer Thermal Energy Storage for Demand-Side Flexibility in Great Britain |
|---|---|
| Authors | William Nibbs, Gioia Falcone |
| Year | 2026 |
| Conference | World Geothermal Congress |
| Keywords | |
| Abstract | Aquifer Thermal Energy Storage (ATES) occupies a unique role in modern energy systems, relying on both groundwater resource availability and electrical power to provide seasonal thermal energy storage for heating and cooling services. In an increasingly integrated energy system, understanding these interdependencies creates opportunities for synergies across energy vectors and resources. In Great Britain, the growing share of intermittent renewable generation is driving grid system operators to seek flexible demand solutions capable of supporting peak load management and reducing renewable energy curtailment. The work herein makes use of the combined power-to-heat and thermal energy storage characteristics of ATES to explore the synergy of heat and electricity vectors through demand-side response. An energy system modelling framework is developed to explored control options of commercial-scale greenhouses with low-temperature ATES. This uses implicit price signals as a key decision variable. Machine learning models are applied to generate day-ahead forecasts of wholesale electricity prices, enabling risk-based scheduling of energy use in electricity flexibility markets. Using a receding forecast horizon, predictive control aims to reduce the levelised cost of heating and cooling through low-cost improvements to storage efficiency. A Python-FEFLOW modelling framework is developed to assess the impact of demand-side response on key indicators of technical, economic and environmental performance for conceptual energy system designs. |