Could be great news for wv...

sodbuster wrote:Well Aaron most people are opposed to mtr, remember?

That means me and zig are in the mainstream and you are way out on the right flank on this issue....

Aaron wrote:No. I'm saying that at one time or another, you've wailed against that mining as well as MTR.

Aaron wrote:So then you agree that MSHA as well as other government agencies share as much, if not more, blame and many of the ills of the mining industry, particularly in Aracoma?

Hopefully one day experts will find a manner in which to store the energy, at least enough to keep them turning on windless days.

Published Nov 27 2005 by Energy Bulletin
Compressed air wind energy storage
by Bryce Finley
Certainly, two of the hurdles to relying on wind power for producing energy are the intermittent nature of the wind itself, and the fluctuating prices producers get for feeding the resulting power into the grid.

One minute the wind is blowing (at a high enough rate to make power) and the next it isn’t. Worse, sometimes when the wind is blowing, power is selling for the lowest possible price, and when the turbines are still, power is worth the most. It’s enough to make a wind farmer or utility pull its hair out.

While wind power generation may be the fastest growing segment of the renewable energy business, and the raw materials used to make energy are ostensibly free, the whole business is a virtual Garden of Eden: paradise, but with some flaws.

Building wind farms is expensive, and relying on them to generate either a sufficiently steady source of power for the world - or revenue for the operator - is a sketchy affair.

But work is being done to counteract these two negative pressures on the industry.

Systems for storing wind energy created when the going is good and releasing it for use when the turbines aren’t humming are being worked on now. But to date, industry sources say that there is not one operating wind farm in the world with this ability, although energy storage systems have been in use in other branches of the energy generation business since 1978.

Catching up with an old idea

In a 2003 paper entitled “Large Scale Energy Storage Systems”, six students of engineering at Imperial College London noted that compressed air energy storage (CAES) systems typically relied on plants burning fossil fuels to compress the air stored in large underground caverns, which then used this air to produce energy at peak hours.

Also, besides burning fuel to complete the compression work in the first place, this air was mixed with natural gas and itself burned in a turbine to create the electricity.

The researchers also noted that another approach, called compressed air storage (CAS) would hold the compressed air in man-made vessels, but that “current technology is not advanced enough to manufacture these high-pressure tanks at a feasible cost. The scales proposed are also relatively small compared to CAES systems.”

A few years later, this is exactly the road now being taken by the industry, and by at least one technology developer.

Earlier in 2005, a Vancouver, B.C. company, Encore Clean Energy Inc., released news about a system it is working on that will allow wind energy producers to store energy in the form of compressed air in underground steel tanks or pipes, and release it through a special generator to create electricity when it is needed.

The company’s CEO, Dan Hunter, says his firm aims to be the first to build this kind of system for a wind producer and will use its unique technology to do it.

Encore will make use of its core technology, the Magnetic Piston Generator (MPG), as the turbine for its wind energy storage systems.

The MPG is a unique pressure-driven linear engine designed to generate electricity with higher fuel efficiency and lower emissions than conventional internal combustion engine-powered electric generators or even hydrogen fuel cells, according to the company.

The MPG can use many different sources of energy - one of them the compressed air from these proposed wind energy storage facilities - to generate the pressures required to propel the MPG's "Magnetic Piston" at high velocities, back-and-forth, through a linear alternator to generate power according to Faraday's Law of Induction.