Cheaper Energy From Caverns of Compressed Air

An anonymous reader writes "By using the Earth's vast underground caverns to store compressed air generated by wind farms at night, several U.S. municipalities will be 'going green' by using that stored energy to generate daytime electricity on the cheap. Engineers at a National Lab think compressed air stored in underground caverns could cut in half the cost of electricity."

Comments

How Efficient is It?

[TheStonepedo]

How far are the turbines from the caves? What happens if the wind that should be generating electricity for the compressors takes the day off and chooses to make an unfashionably late arrival? How much of a boost do the turbines get from the compressed air?
I'd think with enough losses along the way (steps up/down in voltage at transformers to transmit the power to the compressors, mechanical inefficiencies of the compressors, dependence of the turbines' optimum performance on this assistance) the project, while novel, could take a while to pay for itself. I'm not suggesting that bleeding-edge science should be economically feasible - that should come after the science is established - but that efficiency should be priority number one so that the technology can become competitive with other ways to store potential energy.

Re:How Efficient is It?

[Rakishi]

The current method as I understand it for large scale energy storage is water. Specifically http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped_storage

Compressed air probably less efficient but potentially cheaper to implement.

Re:How Efficient is It?

[dbIII]

How Efficient is It?

Not very. The point however is to even out the load and fill the peaks, it's just another form of pump storage I suppose for places where you can't just conveniently pump water uphill. Despite the nuke lobby cry that it is all about base load the real problems are the peaks. With base load generation you have a whole lot of power being generated at night that isn't being used by anything and what is being used is lighting which mucks up the power factor. Running great big motors (like pumps) at night or resistance heating is what is usually done.

To sum up - a lot of energy is wasted but you get to fill the peaks without needing base load generation capacity equal to peak load requirements.

Sometimes wasting the energy is not a big deal. The ideal centuries old application for a windmill is to move enough water into a tank over the course of a week or two for use over the next week or two. With a long enough timeframe in the design it really doesn't matter if you have a few windless days or for solar a sudden cold snap. Compressed air however is a very inefficient way to store energy.

Re:How Efficient is It?

[Simon Brooke]

I think they're mainly suggesting that it would be more efficient than storing the same energy in ordinary chemical batteries, which is the current method for storing energy from natural sources for times of higher demand (or lower production, in the case of solar). Presumably their calculations are based on minimizing the inefficiencies for both batteries and compressed air.

Pumped storage systems - essentially hydroelectric systems with a top reservoir, a bottom reservoir, and a system of pumps to move water back up to the top reservoir at times of excess generating capacity - are used in the UK at Dinorwig and at Ffestiniog, and in the US at Luddington, Michigan (and probably in other places I don't know about). This is a reasonably simple, reasonably efficient system of storing energy at time of surplus production and releasing it at times of peak demand.