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Danielle Fong of LightSail Energy, a young prodigy entrepreneur.

“Compressed air is cheap, long-lasting and extremely scalable, but it’s inefficient. The thermodynamic loss channel is that compressed air gets hot, and from PV=NRT, you have to do more work to compress hot air. Similar problem with cooling losses on the recovery side. So you want to cool the compression and heat the decompression. So we spray water and create a heat exchanger inside the vessel.”

Compressed air can store energy with without loss for 20 years.

“We are currently seeing 60-70% efficiency, 94% of the thermal efficiency target. We should be ready to ship in 2014.”

5 responses to “Money to Burn”

  1. js.brain Avatar
    js.brain

    Why she is burning money?

    Reply
  2. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    to make the point that "today we are burning our money" (with wasted energy generation, like wind at night, without good energy storage). Here is a drawing of her talk:

    IMG_1433

    There’s a typo top left; it should read that the goal is:
    Off-peak energy + Storage < Peakers + Grid updates

    and a diagram of their compressed air technology at LightSail Energy

    And then she snuffed it out, with the bill unharmed:
    IMG_1412

    Reply
  3. js.brain Avatar
    js.brain

    Fantastic Topic!!!

    Reply
  4. Jim Rees Avatar
    Jim Rees

    I prefer "offbeat energy." Are you sure it’s a typo?

    I’m not convinced you can store compressed air for 20 years. I can’t find numbers for nitrogen permeability through steel, but it must be greater than zero.

    I’m also surprised the efficiency is that high given all the heating and cooling. Do they recover any of the heat energy?

    Reply
  5. js.brain Avatar
    js.brain

    Wind at night or just good wind during the Holidays may cost few wind power companies billion of dollars every year.

    Reply

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