Replacing Coal Plant with Big Thermal Battery

 Holtec floats a plan that replaces a coal-fired boiler with a big thermal battery. One could also drop an SMR into the configuration.

This version of the Green Boiler “is expressly focused to re-purpose the retiring coal-fired plants,” Holtec said. “We believe the market in the U.S. and overseas will be driven by the global imperative to reduce carbon and other pollutants that are making coal-fired plants environmentally untenable,” said Delmar. “Green Boiler in its present form utilizes the surplus power from the grid to build its thermal inventory, which can be tapped to produce electrical power during the period of heightened consumer demand,” he noted. “The current version seeks to use the existing turbogenerator at the fossil plant to produce power. Thus, the energy will be sold to meet peak demand and hence a favorable price. We fully expect the local and federal governments to incentivize this technology with appropriate carbon credit, as some governments already do.”

The economics and flexibility could further benefit from co-locating an SMR-160, Holtec’s 160-MWe small modular reactor (SMR), at a Green Boiler–converted coal plant site, Delmar noted. However, Holtec is also separately developing a greenfield site system that could integrate a Green Boiler with an SMR-160 or a PV solar collector system using a Brayton cycle-based energy generation system.