Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [129]
Wind power, as David Marcus, president of General Compression, a new energy storage company, likes to say, is intermittent on every time scale: “It’s a fractal problem.” But, he says, people have approached the technological conversion of wind into electricity all wrong. “The problem is that the current technology has turned the intermittent resource into intermittent power,” Marcus said. “That’s a technology problem, not a resource problem.”3
In fact, the water pumping windmills of the nineteenth century solved the intermittency problem in their time. The mills were used to pump water into storage tanks, where it could be used to grow crops or water cattle. Wind energy was effectively converted into water, which was then converted into food energy. It was a long chain of transformations and surely not the most efficient system, but it worked, and the millions of mills that dotted the country were key to the settling of the interior of North America (see Chapter 6).
Marcus’s company, located outside Boston, near where the first self-regulated water-pumping windmill was invented, has a new technological solution. It’s still under wraps, but General Compression received $16 million in venture capital in March 2010 to bring their new compressed air storage system to full scale. It will use no natural gas and has been designed exclusively for use with wind plants.4
But the current leader in the field can be traced right back to McIntosh. Energy Storage and Power Corporation has two big grants from the Department of Energy to build next-generation compressed air plants with utilities in California and New York. Michael Nakhamkin, who designed the McIntosh plant, is ESPC’s founder.
In almost any scenario in which renewable power dominates the future, cheap storage will be a necessity. Dozens of companies are now offering flywheels, different types of batteries, and other even more experimental enterprises. Many of them are new to the business and many questions remain about them.5 Whereas battery technology is filled with nanotechnological whizbangery, compressed air storage is nearly the opposite. It’s a well-known entity, not just because of the McIntosh plant but also because it’s actually been used industrially since the late nineteenth century. One 1890s mechanical engineer, Robert Zahner, was enthusiastic about its benefits:
Compressed air is the only general mode of transmitting power; the only one that is always and in every case possible, no matter how great the distance nor how the power is to be distributed and applied. No doubt as a means of utilizing distant, yet hithero unavailable sources of power, the importance of this medium can hardly be over-estimated.6
For a brief moment, it seemed as if the future of energy transmission lay with compressed air. What a different energy system that would have been for renewable energy! Compressed air, unlike electricity, can easily be stored. The ragged intermittency of renewables could have been cushioned by caverns of air. This remarkable capacity was not lost on Zahner. “Compressed air is also a storer of power, for we can accumulate any desired pressure in a reservoir situated at any distance from the source, and draw upon this store of energy at any time,” he wrote.
Electricity has some fantastic properties, but it’s also the strangest of commodities. For one, it is consumed nearly instantaneously. We call wires “live” for a reason. As it turns out, storing electricity has turned out to be one of the most difficult challenges of the last one hundred years. The problem has confounded every