Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News!
The other day, I published my doorstop assessment of the thermodynamics and operational challenges that limit compressed gas storage solutions, pushing them into the 100 GW of also-ran capacities. In comments in various places, people reminded me of the long-defunct LightSail and the now-getting-press Hydrostor. A bit of followup with some comments and assessments on them seemed worthwhile.
As a reminder, there are only a couple of reasonable-sized compressed air storage solutions actually on grids, and they have been operating for decades without any more being built. The fundamentals of physics, thermodynamics, electrical generation, and compression technologies related to compressed gas solutions haven’t changed because they are absurdly mature. We’ve been compressing gases for…
Read the full article originally published at cleantechnica.com.