Reply #19: Saving wind energy for calm days

[jpak]

http://www.startribune.com/535/story/1073916.html

Wind power is clean and renewable. Now a group of utilities in Iowa, Minnesota and the Dakotas has a plan to make it reliable.

Using existing technology, backers plan to spend $200 million for a "wind storage" project that would be under construction in 2009 and in service in 2011.

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While Xcel Energy and the federal government also are experimenting with ways to "store" wind power in the form of hydrogen, the Iowa Stored Energy Park would employ a far simpler strategy. Wind parks in Iowa, Minnesota and the Dakotas would ship energy over the power grid to a rural site outside Des Moines, about 230 miles south of the Twin Cities.

Three thousand feet below the surface outside Des Moines, a sandstone aquifer (caverns that now hold water) will be injected with pressurized air, with the air temporarily displacing some of the water. The electricity from wind turbines will power the compressors. A pipe will deliver underground air compressed to 900 to 1,000 pounds per square inch. The compression of millions of cubic feet of air will be scheduled for nights and weekends, when wind power often sells for next to nothing.

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too bad - try again