Ditch the Batteries: Off-Grid Compressed Air Energy Storage

Post by chrisa » Thu, May 24, 2018, 3:24 PM UTC

joncrane wrote: post #75

drizzle87 wrote: post #24

I was quite excited by compressed air storage when Lightsail came into the picture almost 5-7 years ago. Sadly, they could not make the economics work and ended up pivoting into a company that sells carbon fibre tanks for high-pressure storage. As someone who follows the energy space closely, Lithium ion batteries now have so much momentum and $$$ pumped into them via R&D work, it's going to be hard for competing ene…

Aren't flywheels used in datacenters to cover the split second between when the power goes out and the generators kick on?

Post by maxerickson » Thu, May 24, 2018, 3:26 PM UTC

jandrese wrote: post #102

beat wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, flywheels can be easily buried underground, and easily contained. The max power of a flywheel is known, so it's just a matter of putting enough concrete between humans and flywheel, a straightforward and inexpensive engineering problem. And unlike compressed air, the containment isn't under constant, wearing pressure.

You can bury the air tanks too and avoid most of the danger, but that's expensive and makes them harder to maintain. The big advantage of flywheels is that when they fail you know the energy will be discharged in a particular plane. You can orient them such that nothing vital is in that plane (like your house!). With compressed air all bets are off.

Post by Davertron » Thu, May 24, 2018, 3:28 PM UTC

linsomniac wrote: post #58

at-fates-hands wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My concern with batteries is we're so gung ho on producing these, we haven't stopped to consider the environmental impact from the manufacturing process or the incredible task of recycling these once they've outlived their usefulness. It reminds me a lot of when people pushed plastic for everything in order to save the trees and reduce paper consumption. Some 40 years later, we're now trying to get off plastic and de…

Back in the late 1800s, city planners met to try to come up with some plan for dealing with "the manure problem". Large cities couldn't handle the amount of manure produced by the horses in the city. They ended the meeting early, because they couldn't come up with any sort of plan. Then cars came along and they were all like "Yay! The pollution problem is solved!" I too wonder what the impact of so many lithium batte…

Post by pythonaut_16 » Thu, May 24, 2018, 3:29 PM UTC

drizzle87 wrote: post #24

I was quite excited by compressed air storage when Lightsail came into the picture almost 5-7 years ago. Sadly, they could not make the economics work and ended up pivoting into a company that sells carbon fibre tanks for high-pressure storage. As someone who follows the energy space closely, Lithium ion batteries now have so much momentum and $$$ pumped into them via R&D work, it's going to be hard for competing ene…

Post by [deleted] » Thu, May 24, 2018, 3:33 PM UTC

newman8r wrote: post #16

brittohalloran wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar to those gravity power modules: a company called Ares ( https://www.aresnorthamerica.com/ ) is trying to use much smaller concrete 'cars' on rails to store energy. Not sure of the status of it but it looked promising to me. The direct use of compressed air is interesting. Taking it to the extreme, you could have compressed air as your primary utility piped through your home, and have appliances that run off c…

I looked at the Ares 'team page' and I personally know the CEO of that company, but I didn't know he was working with that company. super random. Your refrigeration example is interesting - now I'm curious if there's any refrigerators on the market that can power the compressor via compressed air intake (so it would still use closed-loop refrigerant, but the compressor would use air instead of electricity)