In Utah, Company Aims to Store Energy in Air

A Utah company plans to dig a series of underground caverns that it hopes to one day fill with compressed air, releasing it to generate electricity by turning a turbine and solving one of the most vexing problems facing the clean-energy industry — how to store power.

Under a barren patch of Utah desert, a private-equity group is bankrolling the project to hollow out a series of energy-storage vaults from a massive salt deposit a mile underground. It promises to make a perfect repository for storing energy and, in effect, creating a giant subterranean battery.
Energy storage is catching on as a way to make wind and solar power more useful.

Without energy storage, the output of solar and wind power is so erratic — the wind doesn’t always blow; cloud cover can shut down solar cells — that utilities can take only so much of it, said Jim Ferland, senior vice president for operations for PNM Resources, the New Mexico utility.

If renewable power makes up too big a part of a utility’s energy mix, it can make the delicate act of balancing loads on a power grid difficult. The lack of storage is one of the things holding back clean energy, say scientists for Sandia National Laboratories’ energy systems group in Albuquerque, N.M.

ABC News