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Forget Better Batteries, Nothing That Exists Or is in Development Can Store Energy as Well, And as Cheaply, as Compressed Air (theconversation.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: The concept seems simple: you just suck in some air from the atmosphere, compress it using electrically-driven compressors and store the energy in the form of pressurised air. When you need that energy you just let the air out and pass it through a machine that takes the energy from the air and turns an electrical generator. Compressed air energy storage (or CAES), to give it its full name, can involve storing air in steel tanks or in much less expensive containments deep underwater. In some cases, high pressure air can be stored in caverns deep underground, either excavated directly out of hard rock or formed in large salt deposits by so-called "solution mining", where water is pumped in and salty water comes out. Such salt caverns are often used to store natural gas. Compressed air could easily deliver the required scale of storage, but it remains grossly undervalued by policymakers, funding bodies and the energy industry itself. This has stunted the development of the technology and means it is likely that much more expensive and less effective solutions will instead be adopted.
This is not a quote I find anywhere in TFS, TFA, or in any of the articles linked from TFA.
There are a lot of ways to store wind and solar, all of which are somewhat underutilized. Pumped hydro (where water is pumped uphill) is an alternative, as are giant flywheels spinning in a vacuum with magnets on the rim. There are a lot of alternatives to batteries that are in active use.
NOWHERE, other than in the headline, is the claim made that compressed air is SUPERIOR to any of these other "alternative to batteries" technologies.
NOWHERE is there even a direct comparison made to batteries, other than a passing (and unsubstantiated) reference that "batteries work well for short term storage" with an implicit comparison that CAES is more suited to longer term storage.
Where the heck did this headline come from? Citation needed.
The article is fairly useless.
No numbers at all. Pretty much just, "Hey, they would be a great idea".
Better if they provided at least estimates for:
How much energy to compress?
How much energy when released?
Efficiency?
How long can natural formations reasonable expect to maintain pressure?
How much volume required for X power on the grind, for how long?
Locations for natural formations?
etc.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Huh? We're talking about energy storage, not machine shop tools.
When considering safety, it's always good to look to people who have being doing it safely for decades, and see what's involved. The big presses have to store energy at very high PSI in order to operate. Their inspection procedures are non-trivial. Not very practical if you don't have the right kind of rock to use for storing vast quantities of energy.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Air is free and renewable, and doesn't need to be transported from where it is pumped from the ground over thousands of miles, and it doesn't need to be refined.
Other than the infrastructure, there is little resource cost, since it's not (yet) a commodity.
Now, does this make the article right? I'm not qualified to say that. But this guy is a professor of Dynamics, and is far more qualified than me.
In terms of storage of energy, and what you have to do to get there, it sounds like nobody is saying it's cheaper/more energy dense than gasoline, they're saying you can generate it and store it cheaply, and tie it in with other sources to smooth out the power generation and consumption.
By the time you're talking about tech with a long-life, over time it seems entirely reasonable the incremental cost at the end of that life is pretty damned small once you have it up and running.
You also get the added benefit you can fill your compressed air with pretty much any energy source, and save that power for later. Link a couple of sources together, and the usual whining about "but what about when it's dark outside" goes away.