News that matter!
Massachusetts-based startup General Compression secured part of a $54.5 million Series B financing for the development of its emerging power storage concept.
The five-year-old company is developing a technology for storing unused energy from wind farms for activating air compression. The company said it is planning to spend on manufacturing capacity in response to possible orders.
Energy storage company Xtreme Power has landed a US$43m contract to supply a 36MW battery energy storage system to be connected to Duke Energy’s Notrees wind farm in western Texas. The storage system would be the largest ever attached to a wind farm, the company says. The battery will store excess power generated by the wind farm and release it as required.
A startup building the next-generation of compressed air energy storage, SustainX, has raised a new round of funding from investors including GE Energy Financial Services, a division of GE. In an interview this week, SustainX CEO Thomas Zarrella and founder Dax Kepshire told me that by the middle of next year, the company will start construction on a 1 MW compressed air energy storage project, likely at a coal plant, in conjunction with power company AES, its first customer.
Compressed air is a decades-old technology which takes excess energy from a power plant or renewable energy and uses it to run air compressors, which pump air into tanks or underground caverns where it’s stored under pressure. When the air is released, it powers a turbine, creating electricity. There’s only a handful of compressed air energy storage projects in the world, including one in Alabama and one in Germany.
Earlier this week, we told you about a new company that’s developing battery technology that will allow energy storage for multiple hours on the power grid. General Compression is another innovative company that’s developing a different way to store electricity by using compressed air energy storage, or CAES. The technology uses cheap power to pump air into natural underground caverns, and then releases it to turn a turbine when power demands are at their peak. Basically, when the wind blows too hard, wind energy is stored as compressed air. When the wind doesn’t blow hard enough, compressed air is expanded to generate power – all without burning any fuel.
Pacific Gas & Electric is stepping into high-risk energy experimenting with the government go-ahead to spend $50 million on the first phase of a compressed air energy storage demonstration project.
Compressed air energy storage is not exactly a new technology, but it has yet to be widely deployed because no one quite knows how it would work at a large scale.
If you want to store lots of energy for long periods of time – the only game in town is compressed air.
When it comes to energy storage…If you’re talking big hours and big megawatts, if you’re going to be moving a lot of low cost night time energy to daytime, if you’re talking hundreds of megawatts…