Tuesday, 8 April 2008

Local storing of energy II - a solution

I've discussed this thing of storing locally energy at each house with my friend and colleague Norbert, and we came up with a nice recommendation for a viable solution.

Use a tank of compressed air!

The air can be compressed mechanically from a wind/water mill, or with a compressor powered by cheap electricity at night. Burying the tank to keep the air cool may increase the tank capacity, and also has the advantage of reinforcing the tank such that it withstands higher pressures.

To use the energy you let the air out through a turbine, which can in turn generate electricity from the same motor of the compressor (or a separate one, whatever). The heat generated by the spinning turbine, or heat collected from solar energy can also be recuperated to warm up the compressed air as it comes out of the tank to increase the pressure.

One just needs to calculate how big a tank is needed, depending on how much energy you want to store...

There already exists a car running on compressed air.
There exists also power plants which use compressed air to compensate the periods of high demand from the power grid.

As clean and renewable as it gets!

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