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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."
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
a stately pleasure dome decree
where Aleph, the sacred river ran
down to caverns measureless to man...
from memory, apologies to Coleridge
Those words were famously written after an opium-induced hallucination, as was this plan
my insights may be modded Funny, but at least some of my jokes are modded Insightful
Your right, such a project would produce unacceptable levels of vacuum emissions into earths atmosphere. But this could be a good thing!: Production of Vacuum tubes and Cathode Ray Tubes in the 20th century used up all the easily available vacuum on earth (mined from the air which contained precious little vacuum! - bringing it down from space is not cost-effective!) humanity had to make do with the transistor and now we have to change to LCD screens since CRTs are no longer profitable to manufacture. But this could change things!
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
You'll also need to purify the dirty vacuum that is present in the earth's atmosphere.
I suggest a vacuum cleaner for the task. (ducks)