Compressed Air Energy Storage Offers Potential for Emissions Free Baseload Energy
PTRC Releases White Paper on CAES
Today, the PTRC released a white paper on the development of compressed air energy storage (CAES) in Saskatchewan as one possible solution to produce cost competitive, low or emissions-free firm capacity electricity. Using commercially proven, available equipment, and known Saskatchewan geology, CAES could be used to fully integrate intermittent renewable energy sources into Saskatchewan’s power grid.
CAES technology has been proven at the industrial scale in Germany and the United States, and Saskatchewan is particularly blessed with the ideal geology to develop CAES energy projects. CAES involves powering a compressor using a renewable energy source to store large volumes of air at depth in purpose-built salt caverns to later be released through a turbine during periods of high power demand. The amount of power CAES could provide would be dependent on the size of the storage caverns and the capacity of the compression and generation equipment.
The white paper is available at the PTRC’s website. Brian Brunskill (P.Geo) and Robert Stewart (Ph.D. and P.Eng.) were commissioned by PTRC to write the paper.