Toronto: Hydrostor Inc., a developer of Advanced Compressed Air Energy Storage technology (A-CAES), announced February 12 that its subsidiary, Hydrostor Australia Pty Ltd, had been awarded a combined total of $9 million of grant funding for Australia’s first A-CAES project, to be sited at the disused Angas Zinc Mine outside of Adelaide, South Australia. The project is the company’s third: the first is located on Toronto Island, downtown Toronto. It continues to be operational as a demonstration project together with utility host partner Toronto Hydro. A second project contracted with the IESO in Goderich, Ontario has this year for an in-service date.
The 5 MW, 10 MWh Angas A-CAES Project will be dispatched into Australia’s National Electricity Market to provide synchronous inertia, load shifting and frequency regulation, supporting grid security and reliability. Hydrostor’s facility will also enable the integration of variable renewable energy resources, such as solar and wind.
By selecting the Angas Zinc Mine, the project will repurpose existing underground mining infrastructure to be the A-CAES system’s sub-surface air storage cavern, benefiting both the electricity grid in South Australia and the local community by converting a disused brownfield site into a clean energy project that drives economic development.
The technology works by using electricity from the grid to run a compressor, producing heated compressed air. Heat is extracted from the air stream and stored inside a proprietary thermal store preserving the energy for use later in the cycle. Compressed air is then stored in a purpose-built underground cavern, which is kept at a constant pressure using hydrostatic head from a water column. During charging, compressed air displaces water out of the cavern up a water column to a surface reservoir, and during discharge water flows back into the cavern forcing air to the surface under pressure where it is re-heated using the stored heat and then expanded through a turbine to generate electricity on demand.
An animation describing A-CAES is available at www.hydrostor.ca.
The project has been awarded a grant of $6 million from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) as part of its Advancing Renewables Program. ARENA CEO Darren Miller said the pilot project could open up a new form of renewable energy storage in Australia, which helps to support ARENA’s investment in delivering security and reliable electricity.
“Compressed air storage has the potential to provide similar benefits to pumped hydro energy storage, however it has the added benefits of being flexible with location and topography, such as utilising a cavern already created at a disused mine site,” Mr. Miller said.