Editor's note: guest writer Joseph Puopolo is an entrepreneur and early enthusiast, which green blogs on various topics, including initiatives, technology and marketing.
In recent years about the ability of our power plants to provide adequate electricity during peak periods was a fair bit of concern. Hydrostor, Toronto-based company, takes a different approach in offering a solution that allows plants to store their power with compressed air in underwater storage tanks.
More specifically Hydrostor takes excess energy created during periods of reduced consumption and converts this energy in compressed air through an air compressor, which in turn increases the batteries under the surface of a body of water. The depth of the water keeps the air at constant pressure, helping to hold the energy potential.
When you need the power, air is discharged through an expander and power generation. Through the heat exchanger, modern compressor and Expander system is adiabatic efficiency of operation, more than 70 per cent.
This technology has the potential to meet the intermittent nature of renewable energy, will help relieve the transmission and distribution lines and create greater efficiency of existing generation.
To date, Hydrostor heavily relies on Government and research grants to start. They are now seeking further funding from private sources and government groups to expand. They are currently in the pilot phase of a number of projects.
The benefits are obvious — tapping into the store, where consumers demand it, instead of constantly maintain a higher than normal will create a more effective network. Hydrostor evaluation of that load more than 50 per cent of the world's largest centres are located at water and therefore may be candidates for their system. If this model is true, it would save billions of dollars and time needed to build new generators. Hydrostor does not seek to replace new generation projects, and just make the grid more efficient and reliable.
The company was founded by Cameron Lewis in 2010, when he identified the need for a more efficient way to store electricity. Cameron estimates the cost of storing energy, with the help of his system is 50 per cent cheaper than storing energy through batteries.
He came upon the idea while working on wind farm in Northern Ontario and saw the potential of energy storage. Alternative sources of energy such as wind, require a storage mechanism for the creation of an extended base load. For the uninitiated "base load" refers to the minimum amount of power the utility or distribution company must make available to your customers at any time. Base load traditionally is created by running Setup 24/7 to create the necessary energy.
One of the traditional knocks against the use of renewable energy comes to the question of what to do when the wind blows or not shining as demand for electricity has never stopped. Cost-effective storage of these powers will enable a reliable base load and enable the smart grid technologies.
The ripple effect of this application will be pervasive as there becomes the new opportunities for arbitrage of energy and increase viability for renewable projects near large bodies of water. One of the potential constraints of success Hydrostor will take it on a wider scale.
All current projects are 1-4 megawatts (MW) in the field of design, while larger factories start in hundreds of megawatts. Cameron insists that not only the system can be scaled, but as soon as they have a demo to prove out the cost for the industry, can be large scale adoption across the industry.
Hydrostor is based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and is part of the Mars Cleantech portfolio companies.
Hydrostor-Toronto based greentech company. Patent pending underwater storage of compressed air, electrical systems aimed at ensuring storage of electricity grid scale.
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