Could Cryogenic Energy Storage Solve Renewable Energy’s Biggest Problem?

One of the biggest challenges facing renewable energy as it becomes cheaper and more ubiquitous is energy storage. A British energy storage company wants to scale up usage of cryogenic energy storage using liquid air.

Cyrogenic energy storage (CES) utilizes low-temperature (cyrogenic) liquids as energy storage, typically liquid air or liquid nitrogen. Scientists believe that cryogenic energy storage and supply might help improve the usability of renewable energies.

Highview Power Storage, a company that designs and develops large-scale energy storage for power systems, plans to construct the largest cryogenic energy storage plant in the world. The plant will be built at a location close to Manchester, England, and will use LAES or liquid air energy storage.

How Cryogenic Energy Storage Works

Cryogenic energy systems are broken down into three components: a charging system, an energy store, and a discharging (or energy recovery) system. 

Highview’s plant will be fed electricity from land lines where the liquefaction plant will use the electrical energy to draw in air from the surrounding environment. Once the air is drawn in, liquid air (or, in some systems, liquid nitrogen) is generated through extremely low-temperature refrigeration. The heat lost in this process is captured and stored until the discharging stage. Meanwhile, the liquid air is pumped to insulated storage tanks where it is kept at low pressure. The liquid air can be stored in these tanks for long-term storage in large amounts as it takes up 1/700th the amount of space as ambient-temperature air.

To discharge the stored energy, the liquid air is taken from the insulated storage tanks and transported to a much higher-pressure area. Through the increase of pressure in the liquid, energy is created.

Once pressurized, heat (or a higher temperature waste) is applied to the liquid air through heat exchangers. The resulting high-pressure gas is then fed through a turbine to provide electrical energy to the required source.

Below is an illustration of this process:

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