New Renergia heat storage tank optimizes energy supply
Perlen - The opening ceremony for the new heat storage tank was held on the premises of the Renergia waste incineration plant. The 33-meter-high tower is the first of its kind in Switzerland. It will store thermal energy from the incineration plant in 5 million liters of water.
Renergia Zentralschweiz AG has officially marked the opening of a new heat storage tank directly adjacent to its incineration plant, the largest in the canton, in Perlen in the canton of Lucerne. In an interview with the newspaper “Luzerner Zeitung”, Martin Zumstein, Chairman of the Board of Directors, described the facility as one of the “best and most modern” in Europe, adding that this expansion is “an important piece of the jigsaw puzzle for supplying more sustainable energy”.
Until now, energy generated by the incineration plant could not be stored to later be fed into the grid, for example at night when demand from households and industrial plants in the region is not as high. This meant that some of the heat could not be used and went to waste. Moreover, as Ruedi Kummer, Managing Director of Renergia, explains, when demand for district heating rises sharply on the coldest winter days, the neighboring firm Perlen Papier, which directly procures energy in the form of process steam from the incineration plant, was previously forced to turn to natural gas for its energy requirements.
Both are now a thing of the past. The steel colossus, which is 33 meters in height and weighs 450 tons, now stores 5 million liters of water at a temperature of up to 145 degrees. It is heated by the waste heat from the incinerator. The storage facility has a capacity of 400 megawatt hours and is the first of its kind in Switzerland.
Renergia was founded in 2012 by a total of eight waste associations in Central Switzerland in conjunction with Perlen Papier AG. The new hot water tank, which has been in operation since September, came at a cost of approximately 5 million Swiss francs.
