Wang, LigangZhang, YumengLi, ChengzhouPérez-Fortes, MarLin, Tzu-EnMaréchal, FrançoisVan herle, JanYang, Yongping2020-10-312020-10-312020-10-312020-10-0810.1016/j.apenergy.2020.115987https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/172900Biomass-to-electricity or -chemical via power-to-x can be potential flexibility means for future electrical grid with high penetration of variable renewable power. However, biomass-to-electricity will not be dispatched frequently and becomes less economically-beneficial due to low annual operating hours. This issue can be addressed by integrating biomass-to-electricity and -chemical via ‘‘reversible’’ solid-oxide cell stacks to form a triple-mode grid-balancing plant, which could flexibly switch among power generation, power storage and power neutral (with chemical production) modes. This paper investigates the optimal designs of such a plantconcept with a multi-time heat and mass integration platform considering different technology combinationsand multiple objective functions to obtain a variety of design alternatives. The results show that increasing plant efficiencies will increase the total cell area needed for a given biomass feed. The efficiency difference among different technology combinations with the same gasifier type is less than 5% points. The efficiency reaches up to 50%–60% for power generation mode, 72%–76% for power storage mode and 47%–55% for power neutral mode. When penalizing the syngas not converted in the stacks, the optimal plant designs interact with the electrical and gas grids in a limited range. Steam turbine network can recover 0.21–0.24 kW electricity per kW dry biomass energy (lower heating value), corresponding to an efficiency enhancement of up to 20%points. The difference in the amounts of heat transferred in different modes challenges the design of a common heat exchange network.Waste-to-energyGrid balancingGasificationPower-to-xReversible solid-oxide cellSector couplingtext::journal::journal article::research article