- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/15724955
World’s largest compressed air energy storage project comes online in China
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/15724955
World’s largest compressed air energy storage project comes online in China
Compared to what?
pumped water or flywheels maybe? you lose a lot of energy compressing gas to heat dissipation.
Well, no. The round trip efficiency of pumped hydro is terrible. And flywheels aren’t scalable. 72% is pretty decent and I’m sure that can still be improved.
If you have a good heat exchanger, don’t you get most of that energy back when expanding the gas?
What does “a good heat exchanger” look like in this case? You compress air, the pump heats up, so you ventilate it to keep it cool. The air in the tank is hot, and starts to cool as it sits in the tank, and this causes a decrease in pressure, which is why even with no leaks a shop air compressor will run for awhile, stop, then after awhile cut back on again.
I get that I’m applying a shop tech’s “machines that I can move with a hand truck” understanding to factory-size operations here but…
I was thinking of lithium or sodium ion battery storage
It would take 460 Tesla Megapack 2 XLs to be the same capacity as this. The biggest deployment so far of those is about 200 Megapacks 1 giving 450MWh capacity vs 1,800MWh for this.
The lithium batteries can supply the same power (300MW) and cost $160M. This cost $207M, so quite a lot cheaper given 4x the capacity.