STORING POWER FROM THE WIND O
ver the coming months energy teams from the UK’s Department of Energy and Climate Change through to grid operators and utilities from UK, Europe and further afield are visiting a small site adjoining Scottish & Southern Energy’s biomass power plant on Slough trading estate west of London. They are there to see the world’s first pilot plant of a liquid air energy storage system, owned and operated by Highview Power Storage, a UK energy storage developer. This, they believe, could be the answer to the big problem many power grids are facing – what do we do about wrong-time wind energy? Highview Power Storage has developed and built a pilot plant of a novel system which uses liquid air as the storage medium. The 14 Industry Europe
plant is hosted by Scottish & Southern Energy and connected to the grid. It complies with all the regulations and inspections necessary to be allowed to connect to the grid, just like any other commercial generator. The system can be scaled to 100MWs/ GWhs of storage, similar to medium scale pumped hydro. But critically liquid air can easily be stored in the same low pressure tanks as used by the LNG industry – it is hundreds of times more energy dense than water (therefore taking up far less space) – and the process does not need large mountains or lakes. With the dash for green electricity, the deployment of wind farms has outstripped the ability of grids throughout the world to
A UK company has developed a novel, large-scale energy storage system.
integrate this uncontrollable source of energy. It is now agreed that electricity grids need long duration, large-scale energy storage to support the deployment of renewable but intermittent generation; capturing time-shift wrong time energy. In the UK last month wind farm operators were paid nearly £3M to switch their wind farms off – and then traditional generators were paid peak prices to turn their high emission gas and oil generators on at periods of high demand. The problem is that, historically, pumped hydro was the solution for large-scale storage; but as demand rapidly increases the geographic constraints of pumped hydro – and its needs for billions of litres of water – are making it unfeasible in many instances.
