Excess wind energy to be stored underground for future use

We've seen some fairly impressive uses of wind power, but a group in Iowa is looking to actually capture and preserve excess wind energy for use when demand peaks. At the Iowa Stored Energy Park, a number of local utilities is "building a system that will steer surplus electricity generated by a nearby wind farm to a big air compressor," which will be held deep below the ground for future use. The project is being backed by the Energy Department, but more than a hundred municipal utilities in surrounding states are shelling out $200 million to construct the 268-megawatt system. As it stands, Iowa's compressed air energy storage (CAES) installation will be the first of its kind when it's completed in 2011, but there's already work being done in Texas to build a similar unit.

[Via Ecotality]

[fischju @ Oct 5th 2007 9:02PM]

What?

[Trevor @ Oct 5th 2007 9:56PM]

"What?" is right. Are we expecting a big shortage of wind sometime in the future? Seeing how no one seems worried that oil will run out, I am surprised anyone would be worried about a shortage of wind.

[TRLK @ Oct 5th 2007 9:59PM]

The problem is with storing the energy. Batteries just won't do. They are inefficient, have a life cycle and are expensive.

[A_lesson_in_economics @ Oct 5th 2007 10:13PM]

@TRLK - whilst I agree with your observation about it all being to do with storing energy, your justifications as to why batteries are not suitable are wide of the mark. In short, there's no, and unlikely to ever be, a conventional battery technology that can store the generated output of a 268-megawatt system.

Now an *unconventional* battery system like this, or http://www.fhc.co.uk/dinorwig.htm is ideal.

BTW I've been to Dinorwig and it rocks. Quite literally. US owned as well I seem to remember.

[BigBirdUK @ Oct 5th 2007 10:15PM]

...Trevor was being ironic - sorry to take the wind out of everyones sails!

[bombastinator @ Oct 6th 2007 2:10AM]

@trevor

Well there is certainly a shortage of wind on days that aren't windy. So for those days you need to you can break the wind out.

It's kind of like a mountain sized bean burrito with broccoli for a sharing caring earth *smiles brightly*

[Sean O @ Oct 9th 2007 1:33AM]

It's using an underground reservoir to store compressed air, which can be used later to power a turbine. The compressed air is the storage. WTF are you talking about batteries for? Are you guys blind? You don't even need to read the article to figure it out, just look at the picture.

[strider_mt2k @ Oct 5th 2007 9:03PM]

Wind energy is poisoning the groundwater!!!

[mypetridish @ Oct 6th 2007 8:58PM]

no. oil is polluting our sea

[Fafnir Lux @ Oct 5th 2007 9:07PM]

It's going to be quite a show when the earth shifts, be it gradually or suddenly...

[gjp303 @ Oct 5th 2007 9:08PM]

or why could you just convert it to electricity and fill batteries with it?

[Owen V @ Oct 5th 2007 9:12PM]

and if someone doesn't like the battery idea isn't there another way to store potential energy like moving water uphill or filling those scream tanks... oh wait, that was just in Monsters Inc.

[ScotteusMaximus @ Oct 5th 2007 9:14PM]

batteries aren't actually filled with electricity, they're filled with chemicals that react to produce energy.

in any case, it seems like an interesting concept. hopefully there's a failsafe that keeps it from exploding if something goes wrong.

[gjp303 @ Oct 5th 2007 9:16PM]

Just so you all know I know how batteries work. But my point is, isn't there less expensive solutions to store the potential energy?

[A_lesson_in_economics @ Oct 5th 2007 9:19PM]

Moving water uphill? You mean like this?

http://www.fhc.co.uk/dinorwig.htm

[A_lesson_in_economics @ Oct 5th 2007 9:21PM]

@gjp. I'll wager you don't know how batteries work. Energizer bunnies are standing by the phone to take your calls.

[Trevor @ Oct 5th 2007 9:55PM]

"they're filled with chemicals that react to produce energy."
Seeing as energy cannot be created nor destroyed, my bets are that you don't know how batteries work either.

[Fafnir Lux @ Oct 5th 2007 10:05PM]

@ Trevor...

That statement is not entirely false, although Scott may not realize it.
Batteries are not a closed system and therefore, energy can enter and exit that particular system. Chemical reactions place (charge; bond) and displace (discharge; unbond) the energy. The state of the energy changes.

No offense ScotteusMaximus, but I don't know your intentions.

[engadget97 @ Oct 7th 2007 7:35PM]

Pumped storage hydroelectricity have been around for more than a century. It's more efficient than CAES (compressed air energy storage), but "exploding houses" notwithstanding, the environmental impact is larger.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity

[bob @ Oct 5th 2007 10:12PM]

This isn't new or the first use of compressed air as a storage solution. They've been looking to build one in Ohio forever it seems.

http://www.sandia.gov/media/NewsRel/NR2001/norton.htm

[BigBirdUK @ Oct 5th 2007 10:17PM]

Hello, I'm a PR agent for Dirowig. Please come and visit us @ http://www.fhc.co.uk/dinorwig.htm and watch us pump water uphill whilst day after day whilst you lot blow a lot of hot air.

[Lyrrad @ Oct 5th 2007 10:51PM]

Excess energy? Why not put it straight into the power grid and cut back on the "dirty" energy sources and use this surplus of of "clean" energy instead?

[stuXstu @ Oct 5th 2007 11:13PM]

Doesn't work that way.... you just can't dump power onto the grid and it gets used. There are times of very low, low, high and very high energy useage. Like when the whole country turns its TVs, computers, lights and air conditioners on in the evening on a hot summers day.

I'm not an energy expert, but I have had some dealings with the industry for my work.

[Travis @ Oct 5th 2007 11:01PM]

Raccoon Mountain in Chattanooga has been doing this with water since the 1970s (easily beating the Dirowig plant by at least a decade-- and generating more power, too).

See more here: http://www.tva.gov/sites/pdf/raccoonmtn.pdf

[Scott @ Oct 5th 2007 11:12PM]

@ Trevor:
geez, i word my sentence a little awkwardly and suddenly everybody's repeating the one thing they remember from high school chemistry. my bets are that i know more about the chemical reactions behind batteries than you, but i'm not going to get into an online pissing match because my point wasn't to pick apart the OP's comment like you seem to enjoy doing. i was just providing some context on why they're using the energy to compress the air rather than simply "fill" batteries.

@ Fafnir Lux:
i think you understood what i was getting at with my first comment. i guess what i should have said to avoid all the armchair scientists was that "batteries aren't actually filled with electricity, they're filled with chemicals that react to convert stored chemical energy into electrical energy that can be used to power all our cool gizmos."

[Enki @ Oct 5th 2007 11:54PM]

@stuXstu:

I'm not quite understanding what you mean. In my state, we have coal burning power plants. If we had a plant like this in and it produced "x" amount of power and was constant, then you could cut back on the amount of coal be burned to produce the power, plus for the cost of the plant I would be using it as much as I could, not just during peak hours.

[meester anderson @ Oct 6th 2007 12:17AM]

but the whole idea behind this is that the wind isn't constant, it comes and goes, and so this system is designed so that the energy can be stored either so that a constant stream of energy can be emmitted, or so that the energy can be used when it is needed most i.e. peak hours in summer time

[Watson @ Oct 6th 2007 3:02AM]

This is far from new. Here in Germany we have such a thing as part of a wind craft park, which is almost 40 years old. The problem is, you have to cool down the compressed air so it doesn't damage the cavern and when you decompress it, you have to heat it up, because it is extremely cold then.

This process costs a lot of energy, so only half of the saved energy can be restored.

[Jonathan Fisher @ Oct 6th 2007 4:11AM]

This has been used extensively for the last 35 years in the oil and gas industry. The united states has huge natural gas reserves and compressed natural gas has been stored in salt caverns successfully for years.

@groundwater
they are way below the groundwater table

@earthquakes
salt caverns exist mainly in the midwest, not a whole lot of earthquakes (which was once a giant ocean if you know your geology, and yes, you can find sharks teeth in the shale layers in kansas)

There have been a few accidents. In Hutchison, KS, water breached a salt cavern causing it to decompress and release gas through the soil into a town. It caused many houses to explode: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_explosion

[infojunkie @ Oct 6th 2007 5:31AM]

> But my point is, isn't there less expensive solutions to store the potential energy?

I don't know about relative costs, but I don't think anyone's mentioned flywheels yet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel_energy_storage

I'll let someone else do the math...

[engadget97 @ Oct 7th 2007 7:54PM]

No one has yet figured out how to make flywheels economical for large-scale, long-term energy storage, so their niche remains short-term (seconds to minutes) storage for applications like power quality management and uninterruptible power supply systems.

[Alex Rrrrrrr @ Oct 6th 2007 9:06AM]

Hehehehe...Trapped wind...

[Twist @ Oct 6th 2007 6:27PM]

Here is the big problem with this idea: wind generated power will most likely never meet our power requirements. I have heard estimates that say in twenty years we might get 20-30% of our power from wind (and that is in my home state which is currently investing a lot of money into creating wind farms). So basically they are diverting clean wind generated power from the grid in order to store pressurized air and we will have to get that lost power from some other source. Why not flood all of that clean wind generated power into the grid so we can use less dirty power made by burning coal or diesel fuel?

[skh.pcola @ Oct 6th 2007 7:42PM]

This thing is just plain silly. I mean, look, they have transmission lines and buildings suspended in the frackin' sky! I don't need to be a Ray-O-Vac sooper seekrit rocket surgeon to pronounce this idea dead in the water. Ain't never going to work, no way, no how. Even David Blaine couldn't levitate that much hardware. *chortle!*

[bowzert @ Oct 7th 2007 12:18AM]

skh.pcola said: "Ain't never going to work, no way, no how. Even David Blaine couldn't levitate that much hardware. *chortle!*


'splain yourself boy. What facts, figures, and so forth do you have to support your great words of wisdom? At least they are trying something.

[engadget97 @ Oct 7th 2007 7:50PM]

We looked into CAES for a remote "island grid" system, and studied the German project to that end. Watson summed up the case very well, here. Round-trip efficiency is low because of the cooling/heating. There's been some recent research into combining heat storage into the system, but it remains to be seen if that'll fly.

There's another interesting company developing a CAES/Wind system that skips the wind-to-electricity step altogether, connecting the wind tower's drive shaft directly to compressors, and only generating electricity at the decompression step. That's less efficient, of course, when the wind happens to be blowing when you want to sell your power. But the capital costs are potentially much lower.

http://www.generalcompression.com/

[skh.pcola @ Oct 10th 2007 5:31PM]

bowzert said: "'splain yourself boy. What facts, figures, and so forth do you have to support your great words of wisdom?"

Dude, look at the picture. The power station, power lines, etc., are floating in the sky.