covering the week's top tech stores
with a slight linux bias work is
beginning on what is thought to be the
world's
first major plant to store energy in the
form of liquid air
it will use surplus electricity from
wind farms at night to compress
air so hard that it becomes a liquid at
minus 196
celsius then when there is a peak in
demand in a day or a month the liquid
air will be warmed so it expands
the resulting rush of air will drive a
turbine to make electricity
which can be sold back to the grid
the system was devised by peter dearman
a self-taught backyard inventor from
herbertshire
and it has been taken to commercials to
commercial scale
with a 10 million pound grant from the
uk government
dr dearman said his inv or mr dear man
said his
invention was 60 to 70 percent efficient
depending on how it is used
that is less efficient than batteries
but he said the advantage of liquid air
is the low cost of the storage tanks
so it can be easily scaled up also
unlike batteries liquid air storage does
not create a demand for minerals which
may become increasingly scarce as the
world moves towards power systems based
on variable renewable electricity
batteries are really great for
short-term storage mr dearman said
but they are too expensive to do
long-term energy storage
that's where liquid air comes in mr
dearman had been developing a car run on
similar principles with liquid hydrogen
when he saw the potential for applying
the technology
to electricity storage he is now a
passive shareholder in high view one of
the firms building the 50 megawatt plant
the 50 megawatt facility near manchester
will store enough energy to power around
50 000 homes for up to five hours
that is really amazing just to think
that a few thousand years ago we were
taking buckets of water up a hill to
store them and then use that water as
energy
we were i remember oh yeah i know just
back in the day right it's just getting
my coffees and everything
no but it's it's remarkable in the sense
that we're able to use this natural
thing that we breathe
every day yeah and use that to store
energy i think that's absolutely
fantastic talking about a green energy
source
what a clever idea but like how much
pressure
is this thing under more than me
whenever i had work but still
oh boy um no but it's it's a remarkable
idea and
i really like how they really focused on
the idea of green energy because again
unlike batteries where you have to have
all these minerals everything else dug
up
you're able to use this it's it's just
air
it's it's under compression and it's
able to store energy yes and thinking of
batteries not only do you have to
obtain the resources but when those are
depleted
when they're no longer able to hold
exactly the waste everything else
yeah yeah that's exactly right one less
thing to worry about and
it's just amazing these technologies and
i'm curious
to see what they think of next i love
the idea of
an energy source that is able to kind of
recycle itself
yes and that's kind of what this reminds
me of i've thought about and i know it's
not practical and i know that it's
probably not even possible but
um putting like uh you know you know in
a water source something that can pump
the water because
and generate electricity at the same
time there's so many neat ideas out
there
this is something that's actually coming
to pass well that this is the number one
thing because
with in respect to green technology the
big the largest thing that's been
lagging behind
is definitely being able to store that
energy because again we do have these
advances in solar power wind power
but the issue is where do you store all
that where do you put it yeah so this
can definitely be one of those solutions
that can help us
help turn our economy our world into a
more greener place
cool down the road so this this is
really really cool here can't wait to
see what comes of it
yeah or here's a bit or smells of it
i'm trying to think of air puns but it's
not working so
we tried
big thanks to roy w nash and our
community of viewers for submitting
stories to us
this week thanks for watching the
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category5 from the category 5 tv
newsroom i'm becca ferguson
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