Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: January 30, 2025
The world’s largest-ever compressed air energy storage facility!
China just built the world’s largest-ever compressed air energy storage (CAES) facility, and the U.S. has an opportunity to build an even bigger one.
Tell Congress to sustain and expand U.S. funding of compressed air energy storage!
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Reasons For Hope
China just achieved a clean energy storage milestone: the world’s largest-ever grid-scale compressed air energy storage (CAES) facility is now fully operational. The project is currently compressing air when power demand is low and letting it out to turn turbines when power demand is high, arbitraging energy in two underground salt caverns in Yingcheng City, Hubei province for a power output of up to 300 MW.
Compressed-air energy storage is a fast-moving field that is quickly becoming a useful complement to batteries in providing grid-scale baseload power. And the United States has a chance of not just staying in the race on this emerging technology but surging ahead.
On January 8, 2025, the ever-enterprising U.S. Energy Department Loan Programs Office announced a conditional commitment for a loan to build the Willow Rock compressed air energy storage (CAES) facility, using underground caverns in the former oil-drilling heartland region of Kern County, California. At 500 MW, this could become the world’s largest compressed air energy storage facility when complete — overtaking the CAES project that just opened in China.
“The skills needed for Willow Rock’s operations jobs are similar to those required in the oil and gas industry, historically an economic bedrock of Kern County.…
CAES systems use readily available equipment and are not heavily dependent on critical materials like their battery counterparts….
With an estimated 80% of U.S. geology suitable for A-CAES caverns, GEM A-CAES’s technology has the potential to be deployed widely.”
—U.S. Energy Department
The opportunity here is incredible - CAES could quickly become a new scalable energy storage technology applicable across the country! As with other major LPO cleantech loans, it may be up to Congress to determine whether vital funding like this will be sustained in upcoming budget cycles — or even disbursed at all. In an uncertain political environment, in which U.S. government funding hangs under a cloud of confusion due to executive orders and court challenges, enlisting vocal Congressional champions to defend specific clean energy projects is likely to be increasingly important. Your voice can help show that American voters care about sustaining strategic cleantech investments.