What the developer calls the world’s first grid-scale liquid air energy storage (LAES) plant saw its official launch June 5 by British firm Highview Power.
With a capacity of 5MW/15MWh, the plant is located at Bury, near Manchester. The plant will demonstrate how LAES can provide a number of reserve, grid balancing and regulation services. After the launch, demand response aggregator KiWi Power will be able to draw energy from the LAES plant to power about 5,000 average-sized homes for around three hours.
Yet the opportunity is far greater, the company says – LAES technology can scale to hundreds of megawatts in line with the energy demand of urban areas the size of small towns up to large cities. This means that LAES plants could easily store enough clean electricity generated by a local windfarm to power a town like Bury (around 100,000 homes) for many days, not just a few hours.
In LAES technology, air is stored as a liquid and then converted back to a gas, involving an expansion process that drives a turbine to generate electricity. In addition to providing energy storage, the LAES plant at Bury converts waste heat to power using heat from the on-site landfill gas engines. The company says no exotic metals or harmful chemicals are involved and the process does not release any carbon emissions. The plant would have a lifespan of 30 to 40 years, in comparison with 10 years for batteries. At the end of life, a LAES plant can be decommissioned and the steel recycled. LAES plants can be located at the point of demand, which makes them highly flexible and able to supply energy to help urban areas keep the lights on.