Hacker News Reader

Comment by 52-6F-62 | Hacker News Reader

Goderich is a beautiful town—I've been looking at getting out of the city for a while. Maybe we should look to head that way and I should start looking for a job with these guys.

This, to my naive understand, seems like an enormously good idea and seems like they would have a lot of opportunity for relatively cheap resources and developing solutions for stabilizing fluctuating power generation resources like wind/solar.

Please someone with more knowledge in this domain explain further what might be the benefits and shortfalls and pragmatism of this group.

View on HN

Been tracking them for a long time. They've been at "pilot" stage since at least 2011.

Personally I don't think that any form of alternative energy storage has much chance against Li-ion, which has experienced unbelievable declines in cost (driven mostly by cell phones and electric cars).

A bunch of extremely well funded compressed air storage companies have already run aground against this problem: Lightsail (Thiel & Gates backed), SustainX, etc.

I'd be skeptical unless they can somehow actually prove economics against Li-ion, but these media pieces always seem to skirt that question.

From the article:

"compared to a similar capacity battery, it's not only half the cost, the facility has a service life of 50 years, five to 10 times longer than a battery."

It doesn't explicit say what kind of battery, but a service life of 10 years suggests Li-ion.

I’m no expert for sure. I’m surprised they can be as much as 70% efficient, I would have thought the heat losses would be much greater. But clearly it doesn’t work like that.

Some of the diagrams I've seen in the past show that as the air comes out of the compressor its passed through a gravel bed before being allowed into the general mine. This picks up a lot of heat and then when the system is run in reverse the incoming air is pre-heated by the gravel bed prior to going into the turbine.

From the area, there's a lot of people with your line of thinking from different fields. I think you'd like it, although there's quite a few small communities in SW Ontario I think are worth moving to.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com