And Now, Some Good News On The Sustainable Energy Front — From Italy!

Being able to store the easy, cheap electricity (generated during midday) -- at the hundreds of megawatt/hours scale -- for later evening use, has been a substantial hurdle to widespread suburban utility / municipal scale solar deployment.

And just perhaps, it now seems that a Milan Italy company may have solved the conundrum. It does so by simply storing that electricity in a huge bladder of compressed carbon dioxide, which then powers turbines in the evenings, to generate electricity. Here's the latest:

. . .[A] Milan-based company called Energy Dome has come up with an intriguing approach that stores energy in enormous domes that are filled with compressed carbon dioxide gas.

The idea behind the “CO₂ battery” is simple. By compressing the gas using excess green power, it can later be depressurized to spin large turbines. A fully charged facility can store a formidable 200 megawatt-hours of electricity — enough to power around 6,000 homes for a full day.

To charge, the battery uses a thermal-energy storage system to cool the CO₂ down to ambient pressure, and a condenser turns it into a liquid over a span of ten hours. To discharge it, the CO₂ is evaporated and heated to power the turbine. . . .

Energy Dome is currently working on a pilot CO₂ battery built on five hectares of flat land in Sardinia, Italy. . . .

Now you know. And this reads directly as a means to deflate Elon Musk’s Rare Earth minerals domination dreams. What’s not to like?! Onward, grinning!

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