Comments about ‘In Utah, Magnum Gas Storage aims to store energy in air’

Where's the rest of the story?

Is this really all the info you could include in this article? How would this help wind and solar power generation or storage?

Somebody must be getting a grant........It doesn't add up to me..................

The first thing that I thought of was this has something to do with cap and trade. That they the money our Government keeps taking from those of us with jobs still, Will be used to pay of some big corporation to build these big huge caverns. Then with this stored energy they charge us more for our gas, electricity, to heat our homes and drive our cars. And don't forget the truckers that move all the things we buy and eat, those cost will go up also; and on and on and on.

It takes energy to compress the gas/air. In other words you have to put energy into the gas/air in order to get it back later. Return on energy investment will be negative.

Can't get something for nothing ...
namaste

True, this article is not very clear on the technology. How this works is that the wind and solar energy will power air compression into the caverns. Because of the intermittency of these resources, when the wind or sun is producing power that is not needed, it will go into storing air underground. When the power is needed, the air can be released, sometimes added with natural gas, to then be used to turn turbines. This is essentially how we use natural-gas fired electricity. We literally flip it on during peak loads. Mixing it with compressed air will make it cleaner and even more efficient.

This is still at the experimental stage, but shows great promise.

Another similar type of energy storage is using wind and solar for electrolosis to get hydrogen from water. The hydrogen can be stored and then used for energy later -- perhaps in hydrogen-powered cars or homes.

The basic idea is to use wind and solar to create the "storable" forms of energy that our infrastructure is designed to use. This is definitely part of our clean energy future.