"This giant bubble on the island of Sardinia holds 2,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide. But the gas wasn’t captured from factory emissions, nor was it pulled from the air. It came from a gas supplier… “The facility compresses and expands CO2 daily in its closed system, turning a turbine that generates 200 megawatt-hours of electricity, or 20 MW over 10 hours.”
I run a consulting practice around flexibility. Been around the energy space for 15 years. Boy if I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard “grid scale [x] will soon be everywhere”
On the downside, Energy Dome’s facility takes up about twice as much land as a comparable capacity lithium-ion battery would. And the domes themselves, which are about the height of a sports stadium at their apex, and longer, might stand out on a landscape and draw some NIMBY pushback.
This is surprisingly good! I would have figured it would have taken far more than twice the land than a Lithium battery solution.
Wonder how small you can scale these and retain efficiency, at twice the footprint (but I’m guessing a lot more volume) of a lithium grid battery, will we see these replacing home batteries down the line?
They are talking hectares in this and it looks like the power density is below that of batteries, but its also cheaper per MWh.
A home long term battery makes a lot of sense, I have thought for a while something that goes from water and the air into methane or even liquid fuel would be highly beneficial as it could run from a generators through the winter and act for long term storage without requiring a turbine.
I wonder how resilient they are to big winds.
Also from the article:
If the worst happens and the dome is punctured, 2,000 tonnes of CO2 will enter the atmosphere. That’s equivalent to the emissions of about 15 round-trip flights between New York and London on a Boeing 777. “It’s negligible compared to the emissions of a coal plant,” Spadacini says. People will also need to stay back 70 meters or more until the air clears, he says.
People will also need to stay back 70 meters.
Huge amounts of carbon dioxide can be far more dangerous. The Lake Nyos disaster has killed over 1700 people, at up to 25 kilometers distance.