Britain beats world to Holy Grail of cheap energy storage

[Howard]

This almost looks too good to be true.

"Highview Power is pioneering the use of "cryogenic" liquid air to store electricity for long enough periods to cover the lulls in renewable energy.

It appears close to doing so at levelized costs that will undercut competition from fossil fuel plants once scale is reached. Highview will almost certainly be the biggest company of its kind in the world by the early 2020s."

Article in the Telegraph which wasn't behind a paywall when I read it. The company has a plant in Manchester which is up and working and is building larger plants in the USA.

Could be journalistic hype? But it looks as though this process might be scalable.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/20 ... y-storage/

regards

Howard

[johnhemming]

The article does not give enough information to give a full answer, but if they are only comparing the storage costs to generation costs they are missing out the fact that you need to start with something to store.

All of these things are in the end dominated by the various laws of physics. There is an energy cost to liquifying air and there is an energy cost in both reheating it and also lost in taking the stored energy (in the sense of a lower entropy) and generating electricity.

As a cycle it may be OK. It needs to be compared to things like pumped storage hydro and things like that. It is, however, harder to find the places to do pumped storage whereas this sort of thing can probably be turned on and off quite quickly as well as being relatively easy to place.

Hence it may be commercially viable, but I cannot tell from the article.

[77ss]

The article does not give enough information to give a full answer, but if they are only comparing the storage costs to generation costs they are missing out the fact that you need to start with something to store....

No - they are talking about 'levelised costs of energy', which in theory is a complete life cycle analysis - from construction to decommissioning. See the wiki article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_e ... _by_source

Back in 2015 Viridor (a Pennon company) were constructing a modest pilot, with Government funding, using landfill generated electricity as a source. I don't know how that has turned out - perhaps well if a larger plant is now being constructed.