Compressed Air Energy Storage Power Plant

DarrinWest writes: "There is an article on Science Daily about a compressed air energy storage power plant in Ohio. Cool idea. It stores off-peak power by pushing compressed air into an old limestone mine, then bleeds it off to generate electricity during peaks. The mine was started in 1942 and closed in 1976, according to this article. The thing that is most amazing is the size! 338 Million cubic foot mine. It is 2200 feet below the ground and spans 7763 acres. At up to 1500psi, how much energy is this? As a fraction of nuke? What would happen if that bubble popped?"

Comments

Re:What do they do if it cools down? Make Popsicle

[Christopher Thomas]

Consider that the energy in compressed air is in the form of heat. Unless they insulate this cavern, there is going to be appreciable heat transfer. What are the losses going to be?

Most of the energy is not stored as heat. It's stored in the fact that the air is compressed. It takes a certain amount of work to compress it in the first place, and the air is capable of performing a certain amount of work as it expands.

Heating the air will change its pressure, which will change the amount of work it can do, but the resulting energy difference will just be the amount of thermal energy gained/lost. Not a vast amount compared to the total amount you're dealing with.

Lastly, the temperature underground is quite stable. As soon as you're more than a few tens of feet below the surface, the earth above you will insulate quite well. This is why deeply buried water pipes don't freeze in the winter.

How much power

[rgmoore]

338 Million cubic foot mine. It is 2200 feet below the ground and spans 7763 acres. At up to 1500psi, how much energy is this? As a fraction of nuke? What would happen if that bubble popped?"

<LITERAL>Well, lets do some simple physics. You can't get the power out from the data provided, but you can get the energy. Energy is just pressure times volume. Converting into more useful metric units, that's about 9.6 million cubic meters and a pressure of 10 MPa. That gives a total energy storage of about 96 trillion Joules, or 27,000 MW/hr; about enough to run the state of California for an hour at off-peak consumption rates. In comparison, one gram of TNT stores on the order of 4 thousand Joules of energy, so that's about 24 kilotons, or a fairly small nuke. Anyone want to check those figures?</LITERAL>

On a similar note...

[ClubPetey]

Hydroelectric power plants do something similar as well. Several plants in Washington, and I'm sure other places have their atomic power plant (which work much better under a constant load) run pumps at the hydroelectric dams in the off-peak hours. These pumps pump the water back up the dam. Thus allowing for more hydroelectric power in dry seasons.
--
He had come like a thief in the night,

I wish alternative energy would get more publicity

[Zeio]

I love reading about alternatives to horribly invasive forms of energy we use today. This is a meta stop gap solution, a way of reducing peaking by bleeding compressed air to help the generators during peak usage. The crux of the issue remains, our power generation techniques are dirty and deprecated.

Most of quelling of useful technology is done by: the old boys club not wanting to give up on the profits, a lot of it is mis-information, and the remainder of the reason why we use horribly inefficient power sources is lack of attention (by our sheep like media).

I used to live near a nuclear power plant in Minnesota. I don't know why people are so afraid of good clean nuclear power. There used to be a lot of cancer there, and everyone jumped on the power plant, but it was shown that most of the cancers were not related to the power plant at all, there was solvents being dumped into the local water supplies that were causing intestinal cancer. People don't understand radiation cancers always occur in statistical rings, that certain percentage of the people a certain distance get some very specific cancers. Nevertheless, even after the nuclear power plant was vindicated - the media failed to report that the solvents killed the people, not the power plant.

Anyways, here we are burning coal and fossil fuels all day long. Fuel cells, gyroscope technology, ceramic engine and electric cars are getting the kibosh due to the retrofitting costs. And we burn, burn burn.

Today on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, May 1, 2001, Coal and Utility companies are lobbying the ever-environment-hating White House to reduce the clean air rules on power plants. Cheney said the administration energy policy will focus on more output for oil and natural gas.

They can continue to sell us electricity at higher prices, cut the cost, pollute the air, and keep real technology from proliferating.

Re:I wish alternative energy would get more public

[Zeio]

I agree with you. I think destroying dams in place is a bad thing - the damage is done.

The nuclear waste is totally sensationalized. There are new reactor setups, breeding and tandem reactor designs which burn off most of the waste. The waste can be bound inside ceramics to become rather benign. Not like the Russians don't scram reactors all over the ocean floor already, we can properly dispose of waste.

Another interesting fact about waste and radiation, is that burning coal releases radiation into the air. You ask, how so? Well besides there being naturally occurring Carbon 14, there are other trace amounts of radioactive material found in coal. Burning coal releases them into the atmosphere. It takes 2 tons of coal to equal 5 pennies worth of fissionable uranium (size not weight). Low and behold, there is more radiation released into the natural world than where would ever be from a nuclear power plant.

Think of it this way - I hate thinking like a 100% pure capitalist, but the economic damage to a company being help liable for a nuclear waste/meltdown is infinite. The company would have to close. The media would never stop. So it must be worth it, and safe. I mean, airplanes crash all the time, more people die from airplanes than nuclear power plants, yet we all still fly. And even more from cars. Yet the risk is apparently worth the gain.

Of organisms can eat pieces of MIR for breakfast, we should be able to find something to chew on radioactive waste =)

And finally, yes, nuclear plants only break down because of being in disrepair. There is a lot of mythology about Chernobyl as well. People think mushroom clouds and Hiroshima. Far from it, Chernobyl released gas into the atmosphere, it was horrible, but the reactor was almost 50 years old and there are three other reactors there still operating normally. The resulting explosion/gas release was due to a test gone horribly wrong, the control rods were never put back in place and there was no anti-meltdown measures in place. Most of our reactor designs drop the core into some safe reservoir rather than let it sit and melt down above ground.

By the way, the Swedish who are obsessed with cleanliness, environmentally sound , safety consciousnesses, etc, etc, they run nuclear power and they are obsessed with the miniscule radiation emanating from your monitor right now. (MPRII).

Thanks for the input though