The world’s largest and, more importantly, most efficient clean compressed air energy storage system is up and running, connected to a city power grid in northern China.
The clean energy revolution will require huge amounts of energy storage, to buffer against the intermittent power delivered by solar and wind. Some of that will come in the form of big battery installations – but there’s a huge lithium supply shortage coming that’ll raise the price of lithium-based batteries and make it very tough for Tesla-style operations to handle a big chunk of the work.
China has diversified its efforts, and indeed just this week it switched on the world’s largest flow battery, a 100-MW, 400-MWh vanadium flow battery installed in Dailan that offers relatively low-cost energy storage without using any lithium. But according to Asia Times, China is planning to lean heavily on compressed air energy storage (CAES) as well, to handle nearly a quarter of all the country’s energy storage by 2030.
Read more: New Atlas
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