News about Solar, Wind and alternative green power technologies

According to an expert at the Electrical Power Research Institute or [EPRI], when it comes to storing energy, simple is best. Other researchers and energy startup companies might differ and claim flow or sodium batteries are the way to go with storage, however, caves will be very difficult to beat when it concerns energy storage, so says the EPRI technical executive.

Compressing air and stowing it away in caves, underground aquifers and even deserted mines until that air is required to turn turbines, will have a mass advantage over other forms of energy storage. This will be the case due in large part to the technological minimalism involved and the prospective capacity for storage.

Currently compressed air is priced at roughly seven hundred dollars per kilowatt hour. In contrast, to Deeya Energy who recently introduced its first flow battery. It is a two kilowatt unit that is priced at approximately four thousand dollars per kilowatt hour. When considering volume production development, Deeya would like to reduce that cost to one thousand dollars per kilowatt hour. This is still significantly steeper in price to compressed air

Benefits of compressed air, however, start to become evident when a Power service wished to expand their capacity. The amounts of underground salt caverns and numerous other forms of subterranean storage locations could be expanded via solution mining techniques [this is when liquid solutions are pumped underground shaping new gaps as you suck out the used fluid]. The additional cost of including another kilowatt per hour works out to be about one to two dollars. Electrical holding systems will not come close to matching this cost.

Another unique, if not ironic option, would be utilizing exhausted oil fields for compressed air chambers. If the underground chamber is able to be expanded, the compressed air could be stored at an even elevated pressure, resulting in still less expensive storage than the most ample-sized batteries.

Locating underground caverns will not be a problem. There are literally billions of cubic meters of subterranean salt caves accessible. Any leakage into these underground chambers is more of an alleged difficulty than a genuine concern.

Compressed air has just been waiting to prove itself for many years. There are currently example operational  models in Alabama and Germany functioning fine now for some time. The DOE, Sandia National Labs, and numerous other community utilities located in mid western region are in the hub of designing a compressed air generation plant in Iowa. The facility is set to begin operations in 2012 and is expected to make two hundred sixty eight megawatts of power – or fifty hours of power storage. That number on its own could save a regional utility service five million dollars each year.

Power/energy storage has always been an issue with renewable energy solutions. This is yet another alternative solution to the problem that has very real potential for growth if private industry capital can be invested and if government can finally confront the challenges faced by alternate forms of energy.