BEQS : Marine Pumped-Storage concepts for floating city extensions

Abstract

Buoyant Energy is a new approach to store energy offshore in floating structures and is based on the well-established technologies of pumped-storage hydro-power. Buoyant Energy Quarters (BEQ) are a combination of floating city extensions with the Buoyant Energy-storage approach and are currently investigated by a multi-disciplinary team in a research project funded by the European Regional Development Fund. This paper presents some of the first advances of the project. The first part of the paper focuses on the development design criteria for floating stability and storage capacity for several standard storage geometries. The second part describes the approach for the energy system analysis. Finally, an example for a possible application, in which the BEQ storage is used to balance energy produced by photovoltaic panels with domestic electrical energy demand over the course of a few days, is presented.