Batteries To Store Wind Energy

Roland Piquepaille writes "Scientific American reports that Xcel Energy, a Minneapolis-based utility company, has started to test a new technology to store wind energy in batteries. The company is currently trying it in a 1,100 megawatt facility of wind turbines in Southern Minnesota. The company started this effort because 'the wind doesn't always blow and, even worse, it often blows strongest when people aren't using much electricity, like late at night.' It has received a $1 million grant from Minnesota's Renewable Development Fund and the energy plant should be operational (PDF) in the first quarter of 2009. If this project is successful, the utility expects to deploy many more energy plants before 2020 to avoid more polluting energy sources."

Comments

Re:Store the energy in a massive weight

[Ceriel Nosforit]

Flywheels. Flywheels are developing country compatible. The high-tech flywheel solution is making a small weight spin very quick, but that's only a good idea for mobile applications. For stationary applications you want a very big weight spinning 'slowly' so that you can use low precision manufacturing methods. You could probably build this out of old cars and a ton (metric) of cement and have teriffic results.

There's a business idea for anyone with... well, business acumen alone. Buy up scarp cars and scavange the parts to build flywheels for industrial scale energy storage. Hire Mexicans or something and market yourself as a green company.