“If you want to store the large quantities of renewable energy necessary to balance seasonal supply-demand mismatches and store it efficiently, we believe the best way to do that is underground,” said the paper’s author, GRC member Thomas Buscheck.
The intermittency of when the wind blows and when the sun shines is one of the biggest challenges impeding the widespread integration of renewable energy into electric grids, while the cost of capturing CO2 and storing it permanently underground is a big challenge for decarbonizing fossil energy.
However, researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Ohio State University, University of Minnesota and TerraCOH, Inc. think they've found an answer to both of these problems with a large-scale system that incorporates CO2 sequestration and energy storage.
The team's paper, published in the December issue of Mechanical Engineering magazine, describes a subsurface energy system that could tap geothermal energy, store energy from above-ground sources, and dispatch it to the grid throughout the year like a massive underground battery, while at the same time storing CO2 from fossil-fuel power plants.
“If you want to store the large quantities of renewable energy necessary to balance seasonal supply-demand mismatches and store it efficiently, we believe the best way to do that is underground,” said the paper’s author, GRC member Thomas Buscheck, leader of the Lab’s Geochemical, Hydrological and Environmental Sciences Group. “We believe this is a cost-effective way to store the energy long enough so it can be used later.”
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