Energy Storage Poised for Explosive Growth

I hope so. Right now the energy sector is taking a financial pounding with oil at $28 per barrel.

Interesting headline.

Like the energy stored in this car?

...I hope compressed air energy storage is not about to explode.....

but fine if it works and if it is 'free' - well the air is - but compressing it (windmills wave pumps?) is going to be a costly exercise - and distribution problems to solve as well - I am not against it - but it seems a long way off to me.

At 75-80 per cent round trip efficiency, pumped hydro is the sleeping giant. For example, about 30 per cent of the wind farms west of the Mississippi River have within their farm footprints the topography (delta H > 30 meters, with lagoon pairs < 1 km apart) and water resource for off channel closed loop pumped hydro in sealed bottom lagoons that lose no more through the bottoms than by evaporation on an annual basis. Recently, it was reported that wind farms in TX were regularly producing more than ERCOT could use...a golden opportunity for putting the wind energy into pumped storage for arbitrage at a later date.