A New Kind of Cold Storage

Cool Hive Daily – Technology Tuesday

Even as renewable sources for energy are getting more efficient and affordable by the day energy storage has been lagging and yet is crucial to our clean energy economy. For the wider adoption of wind and solar to work we need to be able to store the energy when it is produced to use it when we need it. A new group of creative investors are developing energy storage that relies on cold compressed air. Ravi Manghani, director of energy storage at Greentech Media told the BBC, “Compressed air can be a form of bulk storage.” Alacaes in Switzerland is one company that has explored cold air energy storage by drilling a hole in the side of the mountain, in which compressed cold air is stored until needed to drive a turbine.
Like carbon capture in geological formations energy storage like this also requires specific types of geology to store sufficient energy. This technology is new and is sure to have some useful applications in the coming years of a restricted carbon dioxide energy system.