History
City-wide compressed air energy systems have been built since 1870. Cities such as Paris, France; Birmingham, England; Dresden, Rixdorf and Offenbach, Germany and Buenos Aires, Argentina installed such systems. Victor Popp constructed the first systems to power clocks by sending a pulse of air every minute to change the pointer. They quickly evolved to deliver power to homes and industry. As of 1896, the Paris system had 2.2 MW of generation distributed at 550 kPa in 50 km of air pipes for motors in light and heavy industry. Usage was measured by meters. The systems were the main source of house-delivered energy in these days and also powered the machines of dentists, seamstresses, printing facilities and bakeries.
- 1978— The first utility-scale compressed air energy storage project was the 290 megawatt Huntorf plant in Germany using a salt dome.
- 1991— A 110 megawatt plant with a capacity of 26 hours was built in McIntosh, Alabama (1991). The Alabama facility's $65 million cost works out to $550 per Kilowatt hour of capacity, using a 19 million square foot solution mined salt cavern to store air at up to 1100 psi. Although the compression phase is approximately 82% efficient, the expansion phase requires combustion of natural gas at one third the rate of a gas turbine producing the same amount of electricity.
- November 2009— The US Department of energy awards $24.9 million in matching funds for phase one of a 300 MW, $356 million Pacific Gas and Electric CAES installation utilizing a saline porous rock formation being developed near Bakersfield in Kern County, California. Goals of the project is to build and validate an advanced design.
- December, 2010— DOE provides $29.4 million in funding to conduct preliminary work on a 150 MW salt-based CAES project being developed by Iberdrola USA in Watkins Glen, New York. The goal is to incorporate smart grid technology to balance intermittent renewable energy sources.
- 2013 (projected)— The first adiabatic CAES project, a 200 megawatt facility called ADELE, is planned for construction in Germany.
- 2016 (projected) - Apex has planned a CAES plant for Anderson County, Texas to go online in 2016
Read more about this topic: Compressed Air Energy Storage
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