Thursday 18 February 2010

Energy project tackles storage

Adelaide Advertiser
Saturday 13/2/2010 Page: 80

A US company plans to dig underground caverns that it hopes to fill with compressed air, to generate electricity by turning a turbine. This could solve one of the most vexing problems facing the cleanenergy industry - how to store power. Under a barren patch of Utah desert, a private equity group is bankrolling the project to hollow out a series of energy storage vaults from a massive salt deposit a mile (1.6km) underground. It promises to make a repository for storing energy and, in effect, creating a giant subterranean battery.

Energy storage is catching on as a way to make wind and solar energy more useful. The lack of storage is one of the things holding back clean energy, say scientists for Sandia National Laboratories' energy systems group in Albuquerque. The only commercial scale, compressed-air power plants are in McIntosh, Alabama, and Bremen, Germany. Other projects are under development in Norton, Ohio, and Ankeny, Iowa.

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