Energy-Storage Startup LightSail Plots Long-Term Game Plan

I wrote up a little survey[1] of the on-the-ground installed energy storage landscape nearly 2.5 years ago now (when I was first learning how to make graphs outside of excel), and really not a whole lot has changed since then in terms of trends. Pumped storage remains the vast bulk of grid-level storage, and while we're still not building any new projects, there has been a fair amount of movement on the permitting front[2] this decade following the relative drought of the 90s and early 2000s. A few new battery projects have come online as well.

I feel like I've been reading about LightSail since I wrote that post (which feels like a lifetime ago, particularly looking at charts made in matlab, which I probably haven't touched in 2 years), and I hope it really does start showing up soon at small commercial sites and eventually with grid-level deployment, deployment of new electrical infrastructure tech is exciting!

[1] http://btus.us/the-state-of-our-energy-storage/

[2] http://www.ferc.gov/industries/hydropower/gen-info/licensing...

This will be interesting to watch, namely from their approach to maintaining and servicing the high pressure tanks. The DOT and ASME regulations and codes governing these are pretty strenuous, and along with the testing requirements (hydrostatic and visual) for high pressure tanks, the risks of a failure are massive, and only one is usually enough to tank a supplier from being used by most larger companies. Good luck to them though! Hopefully they'll sort out some of the issues with larger pressure tanks in regards to the maintenance and reliability - I'd love to see some composite 'smart' tanks with strain and stress measurement built into the pressure vessel, along with some form of electrical means for measuring tank integrity (corrosion action etc).

edit: they're hiring for a composite tank engineer so there's some hope yet - although I hope whomever they get understands the issues of composites in cyclical high pressure service - most of industry shies away from composites due to their failure mode: most don't fail 'gently' - a catastrophic failure is the usual planning mode around composites.

Danielle Fong is a hero.

Summary: they are going to sell high pressure storage tanks for industrial uses while they work on their compressed air energy storage technology.