Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [131]
The latter’s power is sold in blocks with the expectation that the plant will be running 90 percent of the time. No current renewable technology can provide that kind of power. The only way that wind is going to displace these coal power plants is to offer the ability to provide power nearly all the time.13 To do that, they’ll need storage, and most current estimates from inside and outside the electric utility industry point to compressed air as the cheapest option out there.“CAES is the least cost utility scale bulk storage system available. If other factors such as its low environmental impact and high reliability are considered, CAES has an overwhelming advantage,” one Department of Homeland Security analyst concluded.14
Four major projects are now under way across the country. First Energy, a large utility in the Ohio area, recently purchased a long-awaited project in Norton, Ohio. This project could store over two gigawatts of power in an abandoned limestone mine. An Iowa project is also moving off the drawing board. That project is particularly important because it will explore pumping compressed air in porous sandstone just the way natural gas is stored. In California, PG&E received $29 million in matching funds to build a three hundred–megawatt plant in Kern County. New York State Electric and Gas received the same amount for a similar facility in the town of Reading, New York. It will use an existing salt cavern there.15
Although Nakhamkin and General Compression have made incremental breakthroughs in how their compressors work and integrate with existing facilities, compressed air technology is not likely to experience massive changes in its cost or attributes. The plants will get a little cheaper, more standardized, and better, but scientists are not likely to stumble on a huge cost surprise, good or bad.
Maybe that’s its strength. No technology is an island: Like citizens of a nation, technologies are linked and woven together in sometimes surprising ways. The compressed air storage plant that enabled a tiny Alabama utility to store its cheapest, dirtiest coal power may now enable a breakthrough energy system that provides cheap, reliable wind power to the world.
Compressed air storage may end up providing a powerful example of what sociologists Raghu Garud and Peter Karnøe call the “bricolage” path of technological development.16 While materials scientists pursue battery breakthroughs, compressed air energy storage systems will mash up existing commercial parts into an innovative solution to the new problem of intermittency.
chapter 26
“Throw Software at the Problem”
IN 1841, SOMEWHERE NEAR LOUISVILLE, techno-utopian John Etzler was trying to burn bushes. Wandering what was then still the West, he was tinkering with the prototype for what he hoped would be society’s new democratic power source.1 The would-be prophet had a vision for reinventing society—harnessing the power of the wind, waves, and rays of sun beating down on Kentucky and everywhere else.2
Perhaps radical change was in the air. The Industrial Revolution was slowly infecting the rest of Europe, and up in New England, capitalists were tapping the power of falling water to power textile mills run by gangs of young women. Etzler himself had just completed his stint in New Harmony, Indiana, where Robert Owen purchased a town from the radical Christian utopianist, George Rapp, to create a socialist utopian settlement.
We can imagine Etzler, short and stocky with a head that one of his contemporaries called, “massy, the brow strikingly protuberant” from the “large volume of brain” inside it, sweating in the sun. Intense, with plenty of “nervous energy” in his eyes,