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East Texas Getting Compressed Air Energy Storage Plant
First time accepted submitter transporter_ii writes "A compressed air energy storage (CAES) plant was first built in Germany in 1978, but East Texas will be the site of one of the world's first modern CAES plants. How does it work? A CAES power generation facility uses electric motor-driven compressors (generated by natural gas generators) to inject air into an underground storage cavern and later releases the compressed air to turn turbines and generate electricity back onto the grid, according to the plants owner. The location near Palestine, Texas was selected because of its large salt dome, which will be used to store the compressed air. The plant is estimated to cost $350 million-plus, and will create about 20 to 25 permanent jobs."
seri0usly?
also, there's no such thing as a perm job in the US, which the possible exception of a tenured prof.,which is debatable.
what the environmentalists will use for an excuse for why this is evil... maybe compressed air is bad for subterranean cave bats?
"...according to the plants owner."
What does a guy who owns many plants know about compressed air storage power generation?
Anybody knows how efficient is that? As compared with storage in water reservoirs for example?
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Sounds like a lot of hot air.
So does the ground temperature change enough from one season to the next to give them a net increase in energy from winter to summer? If they're compressing air during the winter, when power consumption is lowest and renewable production (specifically wind) is highest, and decompressing during the summer, when it's the opposite, they could get a net increase in stored energy because the ground heats up, causing an increase in air pressure. That would be nice.
I'm thinking if this system accidentally vents, it'll be the biggest fart in history.
Hope it works. There are lots of salt domes on the Gulf Coastal Plain.
>> The plant is estimated at 350 million-plus
Units are?
My belief is that America's (actually, the west's) real issue is that we have a lack of storage. The best thing is to put forward a time-limited subsidy, say 5 years, that starts high and drops over a 5 year period. It should be for all storage that is manufactured locally, and not allowed to be exported until subsidies end. More importantly, it should NOT be limited to what some politician picks.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
This seems stupid. What is the advantage? Why can't they just burn the natrual gas to make the electricity instead of turning a compressor to compress gas to turn a turbine .... -___-
When your compress air it heats up, increasing the pressure and making it harder to compress more air.
After it's been in the ground for a while it cools back down to ambient temperatures.
Then when you're extracting it the air is expanding which makes it cool down and reduces the pressure, therefore reducing the practical energy you can get out of it.
This is basic stuff you learn in Chemistry I.
Square feet?
Cubic yards?
Kilowatt-hours?
Bottles of Lone Star BBQ Sauce?
Ping-pong balls?
Dollars?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Since (I think) gas fired generators are fairly efficent, and can quickly respond to demand changes on the grid, why would one wish to lose the energy required to perform the compression?
It would make more sense to me to store energy from the many Wind Farms, which are horribly inefficient (and costly) in a grid system.
Why not use solar or wind to run the compressors?
The storage would negate solar and winds biggest drawbacks. No solar at night. Not always windy.
Using natural gas to drive compressors instead of just making electricity just seems like a waste. Natural gas generator plants can already be brought online in seconds and don't NEED storage....
Well, while you are at it, "generated by natural gas generators," should have been: natural-gas-powered generators or generators powered by natural gas.
Didn't really think it would get published.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
Someone must have patents on that technology. Will East Texas continue to be so patent friendly when they are going to be receiving the sharp end of the stick?
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
A compressed air energy storage (CAES) plant... ...world's first modern CASE plants.
Oops - CAES has just become CASE.
A CAES power generation facility uses electric motor-driven compressors (generated by natural gas generators)
I think you mean "powered."
according to the plants owner.
Apostrophe!
The plant is estimated at 350 million-plus
350 million plus what?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
This sounds like an interesting energy storage system. Storage is exactly what is needed to make solar energy generation practical for use when the sun is not shining at night. That idea gets me excited.
Generating the energy to fill the storage with compressed air by burning Natural Gas (NG) seems stupid to me. It is more efficient to just leave the energy stored as NG. Converting that to compressed air and then again to electricity adds a middle step that adds inefficiency.
That is how I prefer to think of it
or the most unique way to asplode a salt dome yet invented
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Slahshdot editors proof read posts? Unpossible.
Note: CAES != CASE. Oops! Samzenpus, please try harder in future.
at least if the bubble bursts, there'll be no question about whether or not it happened!
Honestly though, wouldn't it make millions of times more sense to use tidal energy from the gulf, or wind-farm energy or solar energy? The biggest selling point of natural gas is on-demand power, the biggest detraction of wind and sun power (and wave power) is that its availability is not consistent over short periods of time. Some days it rains, some days the winds are calm, some days the seas are flat... just the place you need to store energy for on-demand return.
Something about this just doesn't add up. I suppose though, storing energy could be a good hedge against fluctuations in energy costs, but who really does that benefit? If that's the main (or only) purpose of building this thing, the general public doesn't benefit at all, only the guys who own the thing.
The first CAES plant, a 290 megawatt facility, was built in Huntorf, Germany in 1978.
The Bethel Energy Center is slated to be a 317 megawatt facility which is about one-quarter of the size of a gas-powered plant near Richland Chambers in Freestone County, according to Farley.
So a few decades later, we are going to be the cutting edge in building something with effectively the same operational capacity as the original? Keep in mind these things are just giant batteries that use air pressure, and I'm assuming the same electric motors that pump air in will extract energy when the air comes back out, with a ~80-90% efficiency either way.
We spending a third of a billion dollars to push air around like they did in the 70's.
I did some looking around at this about a year ago and it turns out that the compressed air expands and therefore cools so much that unless you preheat it everything will ice up. In fact the recovery unit is typically a NG turbine. Exhaust heat from the turbine preheats the compressed air which is then mixed with NG and fed into the turbine to get boosted combustion. Much more efficient than compressed air alone.
Going from natural gas, to electricity, to compressed air?
Just go from CNG to elec or convert plants to run on CNG.
What the fuck, Texas Engineers?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
disclaimer: I'm a huge fan of texans. your government, not really.
this is a state that fails to recognize things like the need for comprehensive medical care and climate change science. they push each year to have evolution redacted from the textbooks and think assembling as elected leaders to pray for rain will somehow solve this states perpetual immolation and drought problem. Texas legislature presides over the largest teen pregnancy rate in the nation yet insists abstinence only is a perfectly reasonable approach to the situation.
what marks this as pork is the fact that texas has somehow found a way to eschew its unbearable aversion to science and technology for just this time in the pursuit of energy that is not fossil fuel based, and creates a staggaring 20 jobs in a county that publishes no statistic on its unemployment.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I think any practical implementations of alternative energy sources is a good thing even if it works out to not be cost efficient or give the power it promised. Its still steps in the right direction it seems regardless of outcome. The handful of extra jobs part is useless side bits of information that I'd rather not have had. I would imagine this would have taken provided more than 20 jobs and hearing that number is actually a letdown. Good luck and hope it works out better than expected!
http://interserver.net/
I hope that contraption is patented and that they pay royalties on every kwh that comes out.
The advantage to CAES energy storage seems to be in allowing the energy producer to maintain a lower peak capacity. During times of low demand he produces a surplus of energy, some portion of is stored as compressed air. During times of high demand this stored energy is released and used to augment what his production apparatus can natively provide.
That's all well and good. What confuses me is that this thing in Texas is going to be powered by natural gas. I had thought one of the main advantage of natural gas for electricity product was its ability to power gas turbines, which can be "spun up" (or down) fairly quickly in order to satisfy periods of high demand. How does natural gas powered CAES storage compare to simply having a larger installation of gas turbines, some portion of which will only be selectively spun up during peak demand?
Insert patent-troll court hot air joke here.
Of course the pressure will never exceed the safety limits and these underground salt caps will never -- and I put the emphasis on NEVER -- ever explode leaving a hole where a whole town used to be and will never never spread salt over gazillions of acres of land. I stake my reputation in that.
your using natural gas to create electricity, to create compressed air, which is then stored then used at a later date to produce electricity... why not just not burn the gas in the first place and save that to create electricity?
Make sure it doesn't swallow an entire lake:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Peigneur
store the energy in the cloud? All the big IT firms are doing it these days.
I thought space-based solar power was the future? I mean, Solaren is launching tons and tons of solar panels, right? Right? Hmm, you mean not a single bolt is in orbit? Well....
There are lots of reasons to use storage instead of another CT operating on natural gas (or, with a significant rejiggering of energy markets, oil). The first thing to understand is that ERCOT (the electricity grid in most of Texas) doesn't connect with the rest of the country. This means that all the electricity they need they must produce, AND all the electricity they produce they must need. The next thing to understand is that there is a electricity marketplace -- the generators bid in their prices, and the lowest generators get to produce. There is a spot price in real time -- most times electricity is a few cents per kWh, but sometimes it is 100 times that and sometimes it is negative! This means that if you can store, even if you lose some to thermodynamics, you can arbitrage the market. Buy low [very windy, middle of night, etc] and sell high [M-F afternoon, hot spell, temporary disruption to another plant, etc]. Additionally, you can sell ancillary services like frequency regulation.
Sure, you can do lots of this with a gas turbine, BUT you can't take excess energy off the grid, and you've got to pay for fuel. Right now, with interest rates so low, spending on capital projects with low operating costs and ongoing revenue just might be more fiscally prudent.
P.S. If Texas is to capitalize on the tremendous wind and sun resources the state is blessed with, they'll need dozens of these 300MW storage facilities. Ratepayers will see lower electricity prices, and more intermittent renewables will be able to be brought on the grid. Everybody wins.
Why not just store the natural gas in the same place they would be storing this compressed air? CNG has like a brazillion times more energy density than air plus it doesn't lose energy like the air will as it cools (they must have some insane insulation to even make it work in the first place).
This makes no sense.
"The plant is estimated to cost $350 million-plus, and will create about 20 to 25 permanent jobs."
Seriously, is there any conceivable business case for this? Aside from "My buddies in the legislature are going to give me several truckloads of cash, tax incentives, and a guarantee to buy the "new" power I generate at a premium price?"
But hey, $14 million per person seems a reasonable amount to spend to "create a job."
Three Squirrels
wouldn't it be more efficient to just burn the natural gas for the energy and push out the middle man (in this case compressed air?) Otherwise are you just losing energy when you transfer it from one medium to the other?
As each unit comes on line you get a sharp step in available power because you can't run them at half speed. If you a while you need the output of 1.1 units instead of 2 units then instead of firing up an entire unit (which runs at a fixed output anyway) you can use a bit of power from pump storage, which is what this compressed air scheme using offpeak power is a version of.
Also tens of minutes to fire up is a long time when something has unexpectedly gone offline. Hydro and pump storage (plus compressed air) can come on line a lot quicker than that.
As an aside, one proposal for offshore wind power is to compress air instead of directly generate electricity. It's offshore because you can store the air by inflating balloons at a depth corresponding to whatever pressure you want instead of having large expensive pressure vessels (just like the salt dome idea to get around that). That way you can provide continuous power over time from a power source that is not constant. The energy losses are large, but the alternative is typically burning a lot of fuel in a large thermal unit for little gain (instead of full capacity for the unit for about the same fuel), so even lossy things like compressing air can be worth it.
It will be horribly inefficient, but there's not really an efficient way to follow electricity demand anyway (unless you've got a lot of hydro) so it becomes better than alternatives. This sort of thing is to fill the gaps in demand without bringing a whopping great big thermal unit on line to burn as much fuel as it needs for 350MW when you only need 5MW.
Batteries suck and we're a long way from the capacitor out of the old Batman movie so this idea takes whatever electricity is in excess and stores it with compressed air. I suppose it can be done on a smaller scale than solar thermal so a pilot plant has a lower capital cost.
You don't really need the numbers on efficiency. The numbers will be bad. It's instead about getting something out of what would typically be wasted.
A better use of an underground salt dome would be for storing oil, as is done in the strategic petroleum reserve. As long as oil remains in contango it's like printing money.
http://blogs.wsj.com/marketbeat/2012/06/22/contango-may-be-tipping-point-for-oil/
With all the HOT air coming out of that town, should be enough to power every turbine in the USA LOL.
Wouldn't it be more efficient to store the energy as, say, natural gas, which you can burn in a natural gas generator to create electricity when you need it? I mean, given that it's already stored that way to start with...
Chuck Norris: Socialism == a thousand years of darkness.
you can just pump air outside, increasing ambiant pressure - it will be there when you need it.
Not saying they haven't thought of it and engineering for it. Just interesting numbers:
Storage pressure of around 2000psi in a natural cavern provides quite the energy potential. They say they can generate 300MW for 100 hours from the full cavern. It's not quite in the nuclear class, but if I ran my numbers right, we are talking energy storage on the order of 1/10 of a megaton.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Just how efficient will this be for energy storage? Profitably so? I think I smell an application for an energy department loan for an Obama-supporter-owned firm for millions/billions with a bankruptcy filing shortly thereafter. This is becoming a new business model: Obama borrows money from China, loans it to a supporter's company, the company goes bust and Obama does nothing to claw-back the loan, the supporter lives in luxury and funnels some money to Obama campaign... and the star-struck kids who supported Obama are left to work to the age of 90 paying interest on the trillions of new debt their messiah ran-up.
How much energy is lost converting electricity on the grid to air pressure? (pneumatics are notoriously bad in this regard)
then, how much energy loss occurs through air leakage? (Is somebody going to line an entire underground salt dome with something to make it air-tight?)
How much energy is lost converting the air pressure back to electricity? (again, the notoriously bad transformation)
Compressed air is like Tesla stuff... very popular among people who imagine clean, safe, future utopias and by would-be-inventors. People have proposed air-powered robots, factories, monorails, etc and have even built the occasional full-scale demonstrator (including a full-scale pneumatic railroad locomotive) but everybody who actually tries the stuff, instead of just dreaming of it, runs into the same problems
Hint: There are very good reasons why we see stories every few years about compressed-air-powered cars but no major car company ever produces them...
In doing some quick research, I couldn't find an energy input vs output ratio for a CAES system, given an assumption that a large amount of energy in the form of heat will be lost to the surrounding earth. I would assume that theoretically it is 100% in perfect thermal isolation, and that in this situation, the energy lost is equal to the amount of energy required to heat the resulting volume of air at the resulting pressure by the difference of the heat of the gas after compression and its original temperature. I can't be bothered doing the math to get a theoretical percentage, and I didn't see the expected volume of this project nor the expected pressure.
I would, however, be interested to know if there's research out there that compares the actual efficiency of a CAES system (like the one originally built in Germany) against modern methods of obtaining hydrogen from water and compressing that into an easily stored liquid. Last I heard, there were new advances in that field and likely more promising results to be had in the future, so to me it would appear that hydrogen would've been a better bet. Or maybe these liquid metal batteries?
Isn't the point of this to put the compressed air into the ground at night when bulk electricity is cheaper ( to power the pump )
and then generate power during the day when it's more expensive?
Any significant heat you guys keep talking about would happen in the DAY. That would only enhance generation.
Pfft. Sounds like another Aperture Science cover story to me.
If you don't like the throws, get a new pitcher.
Maybe this would be better if is was hydro powered rather than gas powered.
Trompe power generation is highly effective but has been ignored by the mainstream for some time now.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trompe
http://www.cobalt.ca/index.php/ragged-chutes