OT: its midday and its midsummer...but...

Compressed air storage is very hard to make efficient - as you compress it gets hot. Then in storage it gradually cools, and the pressure drops. You've just lost that energy...

Andy

As I said because you are burning gas in it at high pressure the added heat makes up for that. As long as the gas is compressed near isothermally which would involved muti stages, so that each stage compresses the smallest volume, as power consumed is proportional to pressure times volume and a hot gas has a higher volume at a given pressure.

Anyway as I said I am not au fait with the economics or efficiency, just reporting on a technology.

But only for an hour.

There are flow batteries for stationary power storage. They have a life of 20 years or so. Liquid flows through them.

Lithium is cute and all, but when your power station isn't on the back of a truck, a heavier and more ungainly stationary storage device might well be cheaper to construct.

You can save the 50GWh of cell production, for cars.

Paul