The compressed air energy storage system is not for a full scale energy grid, but it can be integrated into the energy grid. The scale of the CAES helps to define who may be most interested in this project. Stakeholders for this project include public utilities organizations in cities and towns interested in achieving carbon reduction goals. While this project is a prototype and is a smaller CAES, the end goal is for the CAES to be scalable to higher capacity energy storage and power output.
We spoke with Bruce Ferretti who is highly engaged in power usage at Lafayette College. We plan to continue our conversations with Bruce Ferretti to understand how he sees CAES being integrated into communities of similar size to Lafayette College. Lafayette has 2,533 students, but uses a decent amount of energy seeing that there are many labs running and there are around 1,000 employees.
See the main takeaways from the interview here.
Other stakeholders may include other researchers who may want to pick up the research where we left off or use our findings to inspire a new project. We plan to document our findings so that a mechanical engineering student could continue our research for a senior thesis in 2022-2023. Additionally, if we collect a good amount of data on the power output and find that we create new knowledge, we may be able to publish our findings in a journal article. Examples of publications that we could submit journal articles to are Energies, Renewable Energy, or Energy. Examples of publications that we could submit journal articles to are Energies, Renewable Energy, or Energy. The publications are shown below.
CAES will have a broader impact on communities working to reach net zero emissions. In order to transition electricity to renewable sources, there needs to be energy storage to offset the differences of when renewable energy is generated versus when people like to use it. CAES will help communities be less reliant on lithium ion batteries which are currently one of the most efficient energy storage technologies. It will be beneficial to be less reliant on lithium ion batteries since there are political challenges to mining for rare earth minerals, disposal issues, and scalability problems.
Moreover, a design of CAES specifically for electric vehicle charging would be beneficial for increasing the infrastructure surrounding EV’s. This will help society transition away from fossil fuel powered vehicles and towards renewable energy charged vehicles.