"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.”
Sure wish they mentioned the effeciency.
Could be very high, even the waste heat from the compression could be used to achieve more compression and turbines get to above 90%, that all depends on the scales they’re building this at. 70% overall doesn’t seem unrealistic as an educated guess.
Damned good question, and I played stump-the-search-engine for 15 minutes and it’s like they’re AVOIDING that question
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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”
Stockholders and aalesmen make them put that towards the end… to make investors feel dizzy I think
Eh, HRSG’s got real popular in the 90s and now most major plants have them. Its not a rapidly changing space, dont get me wrong. But new shit comes around every so often.
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.
I imagine that the bubble portion is light weight enough, one could put it on the roof of a data center, apartment building, strip mall, etc. That appears to be the piece that takes up the most space.
Another thought. I wonder if the bubble portion could be oriented vertically, maybe inside a simple enclosure to protect it from wind.
I was thinking about much larger scale bubbles in “unwanted” geological depressions such as old open pit mines or rock quarries. The depression in the ground might offer more protection allowing it to scale up higher in volume.
