Compressed Air Energy Storage Plant

Compressed air energy storage.

Compressed air energy storage plant.

Flexible cycling options the caes plant allows for independent operation of the compression and expansion systems allowing for simultaneous load absorption and balancing. In the first project of its kind the bonneville power administration teamed with the pacific northwest national laboratory and a full complement of industrial and utility partners to evaluate the technical and economic feasibility of developing compressed air energy storage caes in the unique geologic setting of inland washington and oregon. Compressed air energy storage caes is a way to store energy generated at one time for use at another time using compressed air at utility scale energy generated during periods of low energy demand off peak can be released to meet higher demand periods the first utility scale caes project was built in huntorf and is still operational while the huntorf caes plant was initially developed as. Garvey andrew pimm in storing energy 2016.

Energy storage and power corporation espc chan daniel vp business development towngas international company ltd there is a significant interest in the compressed air energy storage power plants that are driven primarily by very extensive developments of the wind and other renewable resource projects and. The mcintosh power plant in mcintosh alabama is the only utility scale compressed air energy storage caes facility in the united states and one of just a handful in the world. Compressed air energy storage caes is usually regarded as a form of large scale energy storage comparable to a pumped hydropower plant. Compressed air energy storage caes plants are largely equivalent to pumped hydro power plants in terms of their applications.

Compressed air energy storage caes is known to have strong potential to deliver high performance energy storage at large scales for relatively low costs compared with any other solution. Such a caes plant compresses air and stores it in an underground cavern recovering the energy by expanding or decompressing the air through a turbine which runs a generator. But instead of pumping water from a lower to an upper pond during periods of excess power in a caes plant ambient air or another gas is compressed and stored under pressure in an underground cavern or container. The basic idea of caes compressed air energy storage is to transfer off peak energy produced by base nuclear or coal fired units to the high demand periods using only a fraction of the gas or oil that would be used by stan dard peaking machine such as a conventional gas turbine.