If you’ve ever blown up a balloon and let it go flying across the room, you’ve got the basic idea behind a new technology for storing energy from wind power: use compressed air. ARPA-E, the federal agency charged with providing seed money for transformative energy technology, is so impressed with the concept (minus the hilarious fart noise that a ballon makes when it goes flying across the room) that it has awarded a grant worth up to $750,000 to a startup called General Compression, to assist the company in speeding up commercial scale development of the technology.
Of course, the technology for managing large volumes of air is fairly complicated, one factor being the tendency of a gas to heat up under pressure. The company has trademarked its system as General Compression’s Advanced Energy Storage (GCAES), and in an interesting twist, has partnered on the project with ConocoPhillips.