compressed air storage

Compressed air energy storage (CAES) is considered a mature form of deep storage due to its components being firmly “de-risked” but few projects are operating in the Western world. A project in the remote New South Wales town of Broken Hill promises to lead the way.

Canada’s Hydrostor has struck a deal to provide backup power to a remote town in the Australian state of New South Wales by using a compressed air energy storage plant that will be built in an underground cavern at one of the region’s closed mines.

Hydrostor has signed a deal with miner Perilya to build a 200 MW/1,600 MWh advanced compressed air energy storage facility in a disused mine cavity in New South Wales, Australia.

A Polish research team has developed a micro compressed air storage system that could be used in residential and industrial buildings where additional low-temperature waste heat is available. The system is claimed to have optimal control of the compressed air expansion process performance via pulse width modulation (PWM).

A research group in China has proposed to solve the typical high working pressure issues of solar-powered sprinklers by using compressed air energy storage (CAES). According to their findings, combined PV-CAES sprinklers can easily achieve high pressure and low intensity high-quality water spraying.

Stanford University researchers have created a model to assess how much compressed air storage capacity might be needed for the deep decarbonization of power systems, while compensating for the variability of wind and solar-based power systems. They applied the model to California’s energy system and found that compressed air could be very competitive on a dollars-per-kilowatt-hour basis.

Under a 25-year agreement valued at nearly $1 billion, a community choice aggregator has agreed to purchase 200 MW of eight-hour energy storage from Hydrostor’s planned 500 MW facility in California.

Construction has started on a 350 MW/1.4 GWh compressed air energy storage project in Shangdong, China.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences has switched on a 100 MW compressed air energy storage system in China’s Hebei province. The facility can store more than 132 million kWh of electricity per year.

Hydrostor has selected an engineering company to provide front-end studies for a 500 MW compressed air energy storage project in California.