Portuguese researchers are working on a renewable energy storage solution that uses rock as a storage medium for excess green energy. Their research builds on efforts by German scientists who experimented with using salt caverns to store energy in the 1970s. As fantastical as the idea may sound, the concept of storing energy underground is based on real science and could go a long way towards addressing the intermittency issues that hamper green energy adoption.
Fossil fuel-fired power plants still have one major advantage over renewable energy plants; their primary resource isn’t reliant on time and weather conditions. Sure, fossil fuels like natural gas and oil are subject to international supply chain volatility, but they provide utilities with significantly more flexibility.
If there’s a surge in energy demand at any time of the day or night, fossil fuel plants can simply generate more electricity to fill the demand. Renewable plants, on the other hand, depend on specific conditions to produce energy.
A solar plant cannot generate energy at night and a wind farm needs windy weather to produce electricity. Underground storage could solve this issue by providing a relatively cheap ‘battery’ for utilities to store excess clean energy. According to GeoBioTec researcher at the Nova School of Science and Technology Ricardo Pereira, subsurface rocks that are up to 2,000 meters deep could store enough green energy to power small towns.
The researchers used porous rock to test the feasibility of their rock battery. They fed surplus renewable energy into air compressors that would push air devoid of carbon dioxide and hydrogen deep into porous rock, displacing the salt water that normally exists within the porous rock, and remaining trapped in the rock.
When energy demand rises, the compressed air climbs up the well of porous rock as it expands, creating enough force to drive surface turbines that spin and generate clean electricity.
Nova School of Science and Technology researchers want to figure out the amount of energy that various rock conditions can hold. Pereira notes that the team’s efforts are aimed at understanding how much energy varying geological conditions could store at various depths.
The researchers used different thermodynamic and physical parameters, and developed varying scenarios, to determine energy storage at different depths. Their research could open the door to significantly more affordable energy storage options for the growing renewable energy sector.
Current storage strategies primarily rely on lithium-ion batteries, which are quite effective but depend on scarce resources like lithium, cobalt, and manganese. Consequently, large scale batteries that don’t need critical minerals as raw materials will be critical to deploying renewable energy and connecting it to the grid at scale.
As other companies like Turbo Energy S.A. (NASDAQ: TURB) also press ahead with their programs aimed at getting renewable energy to as many communities as possible, every option to store this clean energy will have a role to play in the energy transition.
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