The development of cost-effective thermal energy storage (TES) solutions is an important challenge to correct the mismatch between energy supply and demand and lead to the optimal use of renewable energy sources in buildings. TES technologies use a storage medium which is responsible for temporarily separating energy production and energy consumption for heating, cooling, and DHW. TES technologies can be applied to thermal solar energy for heating, cooling, and DHW, for daily and long-term cycles of energy storage, increasing the share of solar energy. TES technologies can also contribute to increasing the share of solar PV energy and wind electricity, using heat pumps to produce heating or cooling when there is more PV electric production or wind electricity production than consumption. TES can be applied as an effective and efficient solution to the building and industry sectors. TES technologies can be divided into sensible heat thermal storage (SHTS) technologies and latent heat thermal storage (LHTS) technologies. LHTS technologies are based on a storage medium which changes the phase (mainly solid/liquid), called phase change materials (PCM). In recent years, TES technologies have been developed, many of them based on phase change materials (PCM) and thermochemical materials (TCM). This Special Issue will focus on TES, and we therefore invite papers on innovative technical developments, reviews, case studies, analytical, as well as assessment, papers from different disciplines, which are relevant to the development of TES solutions.
Keywords: Thermal energy storage; Phase change materials; Thermal-chemical storage; Heat and cold storage; Short-term thermal energy storage; Long-term thermal energy storage; Latent thermal energy storage; Sensible thermal energy storage; Thermal storage in buildings; Thermal storage in industry.