Bottlenecks in the development of new compressed air energy storage

How can compressed air energy storage improve the stability of China's power grid?

The intermittent nature of renewable energy poses challenges to the stability of the existing power grid. Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES) that stores energy in the form of high-pressure air has the potential to deal with the unstable supply of renewable energy at large scale in China.

What is compressed air energy storage (CAES)?

Compressed air energy storage (CAES) is an effective solution for balancing this mismatch and therefore is suitable for use in future electrical systems to achieve a high penetration of renewable energy generation.

What is diabatic compressed air energy storage (D-CAES)?

Since the compression heat is wasted by air cooling, and fuel combustion is required to heat the compressed air at the inlet of the expander, it is defined as diabatic compressed air energy storage (D-CAES). The cycle efficiency of D-CAES is around 50% . Fig. 1. Different types of CAES (a) diabatic CAES and (b) adiabatic CAES.

Is there a future for compressed air storage?

There are two large scale compressed air storage plants are in operation and their success encourages the technology development. A number of pilot projects in building new generation of CAES are on-going. All the projects have demonstrated the difficulties in financial investment.

Why does compressed air storage system need to be improved?

However, due to the characteristics of compressed air storage system, the heating and cooling energy can not be constantly produced. So the system needs to be improved to meet the continuous heating / cooling requirements of users.

Where is compressed air stored?

Compressed air is stored in underground caverns or up ground vessels , . The CAES technology has existed for more than four decades. However, only Germany (Huntorf CAES plant) and the United States (McIntosh CAES plant) operate full-scale CAES systems, which are conventional CAES systems that use fuel in operation , .