By Loz
Blain
October 04, 2022
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The new clean compressed air energy storage facility in
Zhangjiakou, China, is the largest and most efficient system ever connected to
a power grid (Photo credit: Chinese Academy of Sciences
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The clean energy revolution will require huge amounts of
energy storage, to buffer against the intermittent power delivered by solar and
wind. Some of that will come in the form of big battery installations – but there's
a huge
lithium supply shortage coming that'll raise the price of
lithium-based batteries and make it very tough for Tesla-style operations to
handle a big chunk of the work.
China has diversified its efforts, and indeed just this
week it switched on the world's
largest flow battery, a 100-MW, 400-MWh vanadium flow battery installed in
Dailan that offers relatively low-cost energy storage without using any
lithium. But according to Asia Times, China is planning to lean heavily
on compressed air energy storage (CAES) as well, to handle nearly a quarter of
all the country's energy storage by 2030.
Now, after several years of development by the Chinese
Academy of Sciences, it has connected the world's first 100-MW advanced CAES
system to the grid, ready to begin commercial service in the city of
Zhangjiakou in northern China. By designating it as "advanced," the
Academy is distinguishing it from the McIntosh Plant that's been online since 1991 in
Alabama – a 110-MW CAES facility that burns its stored air with natural gas to
recover energy, and is thus not a green energy storage solution.
The new Zhangjiakou plant does away with fossil fuels,
using advances in supercritical thermal storage, supercritical heat exchange,
high-load compression and expansion technologies to boost system efficiency.
According to China Energy Storage Alliance, the new plant can store and
release up to 400 MWh, at a system design efficiency of 70.4%.
That's huge; current compressed air systems are only around
40-52% efficient, and even the two
larger Hydrostor CAES plants scheduled to open in California in 2026 are
only reported to be around 60% efficient.
The Chinese Academy of Sciences says the Zhangjiakou plant
is capable of supplying the local grid with more than 132 GWh of electricity
annually, taking on the peak consumption of some 40-60,000 homes. It'll save
around 42,000 tons of coal from being burned in power stations, and reduce
annual carbon dioxide emissions by around 109,000 tons – the equivalent of
taking about 23,700 average American cars off the road.
The Academy says this design's low capital costs, long
lifetime, safety and efficiency, along with its green credentials, position it
well as "one of the most promising technologies for large-scale energy
storage."
Source: Chinese Academy of Sciences