CRYOBattery plant (model) [credit: Highview Power]

The fact that this kind of thing gets touted at all says a lot about the state of electricity generation in today’s trace-gas-fearing climate obsessed world. They talk of a ‘carbon free future’, but ignore the reality that world demand for oil, coal and gas is rising year on year as prosperity spreads around the globe and populations continue to increase.

It sounds like magic but it is real – a plan to store cheap night-time wind energy in the form of liquid air, reports BBC News.

Here is how: you use the off-peak electricity to compress and cool air in a tank, so it becomes a freezing liquid.

When demand peaks, you warm the liquid back into a gas, and as that expands it drives a turbine to create more electricity.

The technology, created by a backyard inventor, is about to hit the big time.

It has been tried at small scale but now the firm behind it, Highview, has announced that a grid-scale 50MW plant will be built in the north of England on the site of a former conventional power plant.

The technology has been supported by the UK government. One attractive feature is that it uses existing simple technology developed for storing and compressing liquefied natural gas (LNG), so unlike battery storage it does not require mining for rare minerals.

The key innovation is to store the excess heat given out when the air is compressed and use it to re-heat the liquified air when it is needed.

The idea was promoted by self-taught engineer Peter Dearman from his garage in Bishop’s Stortford, Hertfordshire.

He had been developing a car run on similar principles with liquid hydrogen and saw the potential for applying the technology to electricity storage.

He is now a passive shareholder in Highview, which is hoping to play in the big league of storage.

He told BBC News: “It’s great news – very exciting. There’s such a lot of potential in these technologies.”

Full report here.

via Tallbloke’s Talkshop

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October 23, 2019 at 06:52AM