World's Biggest Compressed Air Batteries Will Have Capacity of Around 10GWh

Jun, 2021 - By SMI

Hydrostor announces its plans of building A-CAES facilities at Rosamund, California.

California is all set to become an energy hub as two new facilities for compressed-air energy storage are coming into action, both claiming the chair for the biggest non-hydro energy storage system in the world. Hydrostor, a leading developer of utility scale and Advanced Compressed Air Energy Storage (A-CAES) projects, developed these facilities, which will have the capacity to store energy of 4 GWh and provide 500 MW output.

Grid-scale storage is becoming more important by the day, as everybody moves towards renewable energy. Reaching towards net zero carbon emissions will need a patchwork of a mixture of technologies such as smoothing out inconvenient and unpredictable generation curves, including pumped hydro, huge batteries of lithium-ion, tanks filled with molten silicon or salt, thermal bricks or blocks suspended in mineshifts or piled in towers.

Since the 1980s, the gigawatt-capacity plants are in operation and among grid energy storages, nearly 95% accounts for pumped hydro in the world. The problem with building a pumped hydro facility is the requirements of a particular location type and a mind-boggling quantity of concrete which goes against the aim to reach net zero. Meanwhile, so far the largest bull mega-batteries are in the range of only 200 MW/MWh, although there are planned installations larger than one gigawatt.

New Hydrostor facilities are set to provide two times the capacities. They will use an advanced version of advanced compressed air energy storage (A-CAES) technology. The first plant is planned to be constructed in Rosamund, California, and if everything goes well it should start operating in 2026. Exact location of the second plant is yet to be declared however, that too is expected to be somewhere in California.