Not just blowing in the wind: Compressing air for renewable energy storage

[BlueStreak]

2. Hmmmm ...

I doubt that there is any geology where you can just pump air into the ground and not have it leak through fractures (or create new fractures, as if we need any more earthquakes). As far as containers to store energy through compression, that might have a chance. I believe there was a French car that we being prototyped to run only on compressed air. They were hoping to get 200 miles in a minicar at city speeds. But it isn't clear that would be any better than battery power.

This video is almost laughable when it talks about perpetual motion. Your average 5th-grader should see the huge flaws in that reasoning without working up a sweat. That video was 5 years ago, and as far as I know, the vehicle never happened. If you could really pump it up for 3 minutes and then drive for 200 miles, this would be a huge deal, regardless of the cost of pumping it up.

And for storage at the power grid scale of things, there are reservoirs where water is pumped uphill already for storage. There are several big experiments with flywheels, and there is also a lot of interest in "flow batteries" which can scale up far more than the more common lithium-ion batteries. But if compressed air can work better than those alternatives, then great.