Abstract:
Objective Integrated energy systems (IES) serve as a vital technological pathway supporting the "Carbon Peaking and Carbon Neutrality" goals due to their significant advantages in multi-energy complementarity and carbon emission reduction. However, the intermittent fluctuations of renewable energy pose severe challenges to stable system operation. As a large-scale, long-duration physical energy storage technology, compressed air energy storage (CAES) becomes a key solution for addressing supply-demand imbalances in IES, leveraging its unique combined cooling, heating, and power characteristics. This paper aims to systematically review the research status and future development of the coupling between CAES and IES.
Method The differentiated advantages of CAES compared to pumped hydro storage were evaluated. The coupling mechanisms of CAES with CCHP systems, solar thermal collection systems, seawater desalination systems, and emerging hydrogen energy/fuel cell systems were systematically reviewed and analyzed. Furthermore, the construction status of typical industrial park-level and grid-level demonstration projects was investigated and summarized, outlining system configurations and operational strategies under different application scenarios.
Result The analysis indicates that CAES possesses significant advantages in achieving thermal decoupling and long-duration energy time-shifting due to its unique recovery characteristics of compression heat and expansion cooling energy. The core of improving the comprehensive efficiency of multi-energy coupled systems lies in the "efficient cascading utilization of thermal energy," where system integration effectively resolves the efficiency limitations of single energy storage forms. Park-level applications focus on distributed multi-energy complementarity and CCHP, while grid-level applications focus on large-scale renewable energy consumption and grid peak shaving.
Conclusion The deep coupling of CAES and IES represents an important technological direction for building a new power system; however, it currently faces technical bottlenecks such as poorly understood multi-physics dynamic coupling mechanisms and severe efficiency attenuation of key turbomachinery under off-design conditions. Future development should focus on constructing a "power-type + energy-type" hybrid energy storage architecture to compensate for dynamic response shortcomings and introducing artificial intelligence algorithms to achieve smart collaborative control of "source-grid-load-storage," thereby promoting the evolution of CAES technology from single electricity storage to comprehensive multi-energy flow management.