The world’s largest demonstration plant for a new kind of renewable energy storage is up and running in the west of the China. Called liquid-air energy storage (LAES) the plant uses renewable electricity to compress air to extreme densities until it turns to liquid. It can then be rapidly released to power a turbine and discharge that green energy back into the grid.
Compressed air sounds like a good long term energy storage option since the losses over time must be pretty low.
Its liquid, so its probably also cooled down and pressurized
So what you’re saying is that it still consumes energy to keep the air in that liquid form making it not worth keeping longer then a certain amount of time.
There are a couple kinds of CAES. The best ones (“advanced” methods like adiabatic and isothermal) can have 70-80% roundtrip which is pretty good – and much better than the 40-60% that “conventional” CAES is good for. Like many other things it could definitely have its place in a heterogeneous mix.
Having something similar to pumped hydro in places that couldn’t do pumped hydro is pretty crazy.