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Chapters
00:00 – Intro
02:02 – What is Compressed Air Energy Storage?
05:24 – Why go for CAES in the first place?
10:40 – Combining CAES with TES
50 Comments
Will CAES end up outlasting lithium-ion in more ways than one? Use code UNDECIDED50 to get 50% OFF your first Factor box plus 20% off your next month at https://bit.ly/3R5fOSk!
If you liked this, check out How This New Battery is Changing the Game https://youtu.be/IEep_DuTt1o?list=PLnTSM-ORSgi7uzySCXq8VXhodHB5B5OiQ
"We can't control the weather".
dubai: ツ
It seemed like you didn't mention the actual energy stored in MWh for any of the projects. For example, the Yingcheng CAES is rated at 1500 MWh and round-trip efficiency is claimed to be 70%. This would be 5 hours at full power, not much more than the 4 hours typically quoted for battery ESS.
http://en.sasac.gov.cn/2024/04/18/c_16983.htm
I still don't understand why the air needs to be reheated for the turbine. Are the temps so low that a turbine couldn't be engineered to function at the needed temp?
they have always existed, known as workshop compressors lol
I want to see liquified co2 used as a storage medium in geothermal relevant locations. You both get the storage, the return on energy, the side reaction formation of carbonates…. And if you go-inject hydrogen you can be forming new hydrocarbons as a side product useful for transport
Love in hindi india
The last time I used a ca of air it shot out an icey/slush.
Too much energy loss powering the compression pump, and then loss from the air powered generator. The best storage system will be the splitting of a chemical through electrolysis, then reuniting the two in a electric cell when power is needed. Sure there is limited storage and safety issues for some candidates such as water splitting, but I believe it is waiting to be discovered.
The greens said Britain needed 6,000 windmills to get 100% of their electricity. They have 9,000 now. They have closed zero fossil fule plants. STOP WASTING OUR TIME AND MONEY PLEASE.
"canned air" is actually refrigerant, not air. but yes, decompression means lower temperature, so the principle is the same
Maybe CAES systems should utilize and store the waste heat in daytime from PV farms to reheat the air before it passes through a turbine?
it would be interesting to have a side by side comparion of compressed air vs gravity. lol, question answered a couple seconds of being posed.
Why not use the caverns as a water reservoir for pumped hydro? Instead of a hill, the height difference can be between surface and cavern (assuming there is a water source close enough to fill it up).
Interesting watch. I did my Masters mechanical engineering project on the viability of CAES on a local site.
I found it could be worthwhile, but given the efficiency is low it needed an existing cavern (salt mine usually) and could use excess energy (such as wind).
You can store the CA for quite a while, but the economics of a daily charge/discharge cycle are very different to only a weekend cycle.
Storing the adiabatic heat is the key problem – the compressed air itself doesn’t contain any more energy than uncompressed air at the same temperature- although it does enable heat to be taken out of the environment like the can of air you demonstrated.
Compressing Air is a very inefficient process that generates lots of waste heat. (35-50% of energy is lost to heat which can't be stored). Thus a RTE of just 50-65% at best.
It's misleading to say solar is not available 24/7 as the sun has NOT turned off in a billion years. Issue is one of logistics, moving energy from solar to where needed as is always available across half the of Earths surface at any moment in time.
Chart (6:41) detailing compressed storage costing $293/kWh. Li-ion (or LFP) is now available at <$100/kWh. While theoretical costs are often quoted at per-kWh (energy), or per-kW (power), little is discussed on total site infrastructure cost to deploy per 500 MW, or 1 GWh of storage.
If want real cost, suggest taking a look at a battery energy storage facility in Australia that will soon have 1.08 GWh of storage and able to supply 0.54 GW of power. (this just one facility). Australia has been an energy storage leader for almost a decade now. It's also a leader is amount of deployed solar. (particularly PV solar) Just recently Australia gave the go ahead to build a solar project that will export power via cable to Singapore. A great demonstration of transporting solar to where its needed from locations where it is best harvested.
This video seems overly focused on 4-hour duration of Li-ion as being a limit. This just a typically operational spec, per individual unit (if supplying maximum power at continuous output). Many units make up an energy storage system and most of time it's operated below maximum power output.
A good example is state of California in 2024 where renewable energy supplied 100% of consumption for more than 100 days (so far, and year is not over). This because battery energy storage is being deployed at record amounts of new capacity, and it utilized for reducing the amount of standby capacity that needs to be available (ie: reduces fuel consumption from non-renewable sources that doesn't get consumed, idling plants for just incase power demand)
Its really all about storing the heat and reusing it.
Compressed air is horribly inefficient to make. Typically, you get less than 10% energy back out. Only way to improve that is to put the heat back in when it runs the generator.
Don't forget the electric drive motor efficiency and generator efficiency is going to be a major limitation as well.
So how much Energy do you get out of it versus how much it took to compress it?
In Denmark, we had an inventor named Jacob Ellehammer, who was among the first to fly in 1906. He was very interested in precisely compressed air, and built several boats with compressed air, among the famous "tivoli boats" in our well-known Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen, which was later electrified only 20 years ago. He also invented the ejection pump, which is used on ships all over the world. The whole world is full of compressed air tools, so it's probably high time we looked at it again. Although a pressure tank can explode, it is not dynamite or lithium batteries.😜
Having to store lots of compressed air and the heat associated with the compression for use during decompression sounds like it will pose many issues with scaling for both power and duration. Using geological formations for pressurized gas storage also sounds risky when you look at the history of basements blowing up from underground natural gas and propane storage leaks. While compressed air may not pose a direct explosion or poisoning hazard, it could displace other unwanted things.
May as well just develop boring tech for deep thermal wells and go with a simple geothermal steam cycle.
pun count 20?
Great Video, but I tried to check twice and did not get for how long A-CAES can store power or how fast does the energy storage decay? I assume since heat is being stored this storage will get lost through time making it less efficient the longer it is stored. Are there numbers on how the decay looks like? And how long the storage can last?
What if we use geothermal power to heat water to move turbines? It would be technically unlimited power in theory.
CAES is not the solution, not even close. You can get far better results from a lifted weight, and it would take up less space and cost far less. Water sounds cool, I mean dams have proven themselves, it's just that water is …well…. unpredictable and can corrode things (I mean, we have a busted main just about every 4 years somewhere in this county). So using water to hold pressure in a ground system ("grounded" keyword) is asking for issues.
I think the more forms of storage that there are the better the system will be for dealing with the demands on the grid.
The UK is loaded with unused coal mines so this could be a great answer to our energy storage needs. Perhaps adiabatic wouldn't be needed if we also used ground source heat energy from the same facility
it's unrealistic to expect a private company to invest millions in using excess energy to store when there is no such guarentee for excess energy. And excess energy also is not free like some would like to think. It would have to be bought just like every other energy since when there is storago it would no longer be excess. That leaves only government as investors. It is very very very unlikely to happen on a large scale.
Interesting video, thanks. I'd've pronounced "adiabatic," along the same principles as "amoral." In other words, not, ad-dee-a-BAT-ick, but A-dye-a-BAT-ick (first syllable to rhyme with "hay," second to rhyme with "sigh," etc.) Since writing that, I went onto Wiktionary, and it seemed to confirm my thesis. But, since THEN, I asked an AI, (Copilot,) and it said that your pronunciation was more widespread in scientific circles. I have to admit, your way sounds cooler!
I reckon this tech does have significant possibility for the future.
CAES sounds very good …. fingers crossed. Jim Bell (Australia)
Im a bit dubious for 2 reasons. First is the energy density. While easy to scale up yhat is still alot of space per kwh. Second is the potential of a containment breach. Compressed air is horrifically dangerous if released in an uncontroled manner. I wouldn't want to live on yop of one of those tanks long term
I agee the value of this research to advance pneumatic/hydraulic storage efficiency, but i have heavy doubts about its long-term chances. There is a reason why in industry air is typically the most expensive power source. Air also has moisture control requirements and both p/h are gighly prone to leakes.
What a waste of underground cubic.
They use turbines for CAES? You'd think it would be more net positive to use Stirling Generators.
Yes, this has been discussed for decades. It remains, like most energy storage systems, material intensive, complicated (so a maintenance headache) and expensive for the energy stored. Can it do better than 70% round trip efficiency? Maybe 80% but that is still less than batteries which themselves aren't cost effective. I think it will be talked about for more decades and nothing much will happen.
Its not a battery its a freaking cylinder.
Thank you for you videos and you answers I hope you to tell me when we can see cars with solid state battery thank you
C.A.E.S…. I bet there are a BUNCH of people out there wondering who passed up the opportunity to add a V to that acronym. It could have been C.A.V.E.S.!
This video has a few to many puns and is a little thin explaining the reason heat is so important to efficiency in compressed air storage,
That has a terribly low efficiency due to the compressed air cooling down and thereby losing most of the stored energy.
There were many that tried it (even an Indian company tried to make cars that ran on compressed air).
It takes a few seconds to realize what the problem is (pressure is the same as heat).
Came for the wordplay. Was not disappointed. "The key a-word here isn't advanced, it's…". Thanks Matt for always being informative and entertaining.
It's better to use gravity energy storage system 😅😅😅😅😅…
could you combine the CAES system with a thermal battery, and then extract it back out?
Sand Batteries and Air Batteries. That's the combo for storing more heat than water with these systems.
Why, if at that RTE, you can create H2, eFuels or SAF?
Corre Energy is actually Irish not Dutch.
Just change the name of the channel to Battery Powered with Matt Ferrell . I've already decided what to make content about.
Could you store the excess heat to sand batteries?
I'll see you in Canada
There are multiple ways of reducing the need for grid scale storage. Once sodium cells become more freely available and the price starts to fall, 30kWh of domestic storage is within reach for about half the population, at about $10,000USD add in a PV roof and the most efficient homes should not be drawing any power from the grid. I am in the UK and have got my total energy usage down to £1100 per year. I'm working on radically reducing that.