System Stores Wind and Solar Power in the Form of Natural Gas, to Fit Neatly Into Existing Infrastructure

I'm getting tired of that popup banner telling me popsci wants to hear from me, if anything, it's having the opposite effect.

Check out GREEN FREEDOM from Los Alamos National Labs:

Synthetic Fuel Concept to Steal CO2 From Air

White paper on Green Freedom concept
LOS ALAMOS, N.M., February 12, 2008 — Green Freedom™ for carbon-neutral, sulfur-free fuel and chemical production

www.lanl.gov/news/index.php/fuseaction/home.story/story_id/12554

Sounds promising. A simple idea that uses the existing infrastructure, plus sequesters some carbon dioxide. And I'm glad they're thinking of it in terms of backup energy storage - that can be implemented much more rapidly and will give the technology some room to mature.

If this has decent efficiency, it could become the most popular source of vehicle fuel. It is easy to convert existing engines, and they last longer, too. Bob Stuart

BobStuart, hydrogen has a round trip efficiency of 30-50%; since this system makes hydrogen it's not going to be more efficient than this. Probably it's going to be much less efficient given that only 1/2600 air molecules is CO2 and it's going to cost you a lot of energy pulling them out of the air.

Nissan, in a Tokyo demonstration recently, deployed exchangeable batteries for the electric Taxi fleet used there, city-wide. Freshly charged batteries were exchanged in moments to waiting taxi-cabs! Using electric car batteries as ballast may also mitigate the problem of intermittent and over-production of Solar, Wind, Tidal, Wave, systems of renewable or perpetual, if you prefer, power. Nuclear rector's necessarily steady output, unused at night time, when demand is low, can also be absorbed by charging automotive batteries, thus resolving the over-production problem nicely. America must convert from its foreign liquid energy economy to a domestic electric economy to balance the books and return to former prosperity. The sooner this convulsive paradigm shift occurs, the better for the average American citizen and the environment. Nuclear /Electric powered , electric bullet train networks are a reality in China and Europe as they make efforts to avoid the inevitable “Oil Price Crunch”. Only America stubbornly depends on oil alone. Why?

Soylent is right, this would be VERY EXPENSIVE natural gas. With Wind Energy running 12-15 cents per kwh. Solar at 30-50 cents per kwh. Add the capital cost of the plant & storage. Probably adding another 1-3 cents per kwh. And 30-50% conversion efficiency. If using the NG to produce electricity, round trip conversion efficiency would be more like 15-30% efficiency. So using "green" Wind Energy you will have an energy cost of around 37 cents per thermal kwh using Wind and $1.04 per thermal kwh using Solar. With current NG price of 1.4 cents per thermal kwh. That's 26 to 75X higher cost. Economically unsustainable.

This kind of stupidity is being promoted, while at the same time Western governments are on an IDIOTIC BINGE of replacing Coal power generation(and believe it or not - Nuclear - see Vermont Yankee) with NG. Conserve the NG for these Energy Storage applications at a few percent of the cost, and use clean, green Nuclear to generate baseload power and heat. And convert the NG into liquid fuels, like Methanol for 3.2 cents per liter, and use that to replace rapidly dwindling Oil. It is a criminal act to waste NG for baseload power generation.

Use excess energy to compress the abundantly avilable air. Store it in reservoirs used for storing natural gas. Run turbines at night using this comopressed air. Energy loss in the whole cycle is less than 15 %. Germany already has a plant using this principle with a capacity of of 120 MW.