Optimisation and economic assessment of liquid air energy storage integrated with nuclear and wind power

As the global energy system transitions toward net-zero, the integration of intermittent renewables with inflexible baseload generation such as nuclear power poses significant challenges to grid stability. Liquid Air Energy Storage (LAES) offers an opportunity to address such challenges due to no geographical constrains, and compatible (large) scale and storage duration. This study proposes and assesses an integrated Wind-Nuclear-LAES system, in which LAES is electrically coupled with an offshore wind farm (WF) and thermally integrated with a near-shore NPP. Such integration can interact with the main grid more flexibly, leading to enhanced grid stability and improved operational and economic benefits of the power plants. A thermodynamic model was developed for the LAES integrated with heat input from the NPP, demonstrating an enhanced round-trip efficiency of 67%. A market-based optimisation framework is implemented using a Gaussian Mixture Model-based time-series aggregation method to identify representative electricity price days, enabling manageable year-round optimisation. Within this framework, the operational and engineering parameters of LAES system is jointly optimised to match the operational characteristics of the NPP and WF. The results show that the optimised system achieved a discounted payback period of 5.13 years, a levelized cost of storage (LCOS) of $147/MWh, and a peak regulation correlation coefficient of 0.70. Furthermore, we proposed the use of Arbitrage Revenue Coefficient (ARC) to quantify the intra-day revenue potential and assess the long-term revenue prospects. These findings demonstrate that integrating LAES with nuclear and wind power provides a feasible pathway to enhance nuclear load flexibility and support energy systems with high shares of variable renewable energy.