Trends in Sustainable Energy Storage for Urban Infrastructures

Abstract

It is the result of the increased urbanization levels and the simultaneous development of the metropolitan infrastructures that have resulted in the unprecedented growth of global energy demands. The current cities consume over 75 percent of the total energy being produced globally leading to the critical challenges related to peak-load management, grid resilience, carbon emissions, and integration of renewable energies. Green technologies of energy storage have become the key facilitators of dealing with these issues in order to enable effective capture, storage, and redistribution of energy. The paper will critically review the neo trends in sustainable energy storage of urban infrastructures with an analysis of electrochemical, mechanical, thermal, and hybrid energy storage models. The paper also assesses how smart grids, urban microgrids and decentralized energy networks can help increase resilience levels to energy at the urban level. In the review, there is a lot of literature to map the development of storage technologies, and method frameworks are built to analyze the performance, lifecycle viability, and integration capability. On the one hand, experimental outcomes and comparative modeling demonstrate the differences in the performances of different technologies in relation to energy density, environmental impact, expenses, and scalability. Based on the analysis, it is shown that, although the use of lithium-ion batteries will remain in the short-term storage, the long-term storage will be characterized by flow batteries, compressed-air energy storage (CAES), hydrogen storage, and thermal batteries, which are expected to dominate in the future city-scale application. It is shown in a multi-criteria analysis that hybrid storage architectures are the best to use with smart urban grids. The paper wraps up by giving the main policy considerations, technical challenges, and gaps in research, which should be resolved to achieve fully sustainable, scalable, and smart energy storage ecosystems in new urban city settings of the next generations.