POWER September 2020 - 23

TOP PLANT
1. Several officials gathered for the opening
of Hydrostor's Goderich facility on November
22, 2019. From left to right, Annette Verschuren
(CEO of NRStor), Hon. Lisa Thompson
(Member of the Ontario Provincial Parliament
for Huron-Bruce), John Grace (Mayor of Goderich),
Hon. Bill Walker (Associate Minister
of Energy for the Province of Ontario), Curt
VanWalleghem (CEO of Hydrostor), Leah Lawrence
(President and CEO of Sustainable Development
Technology Canada [SDTC]), and
Peter Gregg (CEO of the Independent Electricity
System Operator [IESO]) are shown
here taking part in the ribbon-cutting ceremony.
Courtesy: Hydrostor
The Goderich plant, among other
things, is envisioned as a replacement
for gas-fired peaking capacity. Hydrostor
said the facility will lower electricity
costs for ratepayers, and also have a positive
environmental impact. The company
said it expects more than 20,000 metric
tons of greenhouse gas emissions will
be avoided in the first decade of operation
for the plant.
Hydrostor used the company's Toronto
facility as a research and development
project to validate the concept behind
the Goderich plant. The company said the
Toronto plant " demonstrated the A-CAES
approach to hydrostatic compensation of
the air storage using underwater storage
vessels, [while] the Goderich facility uses
an underground cavern. This shift towards
underground caverns greatly improves
the technology's siting ability, making it
a much more valuable solution for utility
customers. Not only can the land-based
storage facility be sited further inland, it
can also leverage existing transmission
infrastructure and brownfield sites [such
as abandoned mines] to cut costs and deliver
projects more quickly. "
An Unconventional Approach
Hydrostor said the first conventional
CAES facility was commissioned in Huntorf,
Germany, in 1978, with a second facility
built in McIntosh, Alabama, in 1991.
Both remain in operation, using diabatic
(gas-fired) CAES technology. Hydrostor
said this traditional CAES has two drawbacks,
starting with its reliance on natural
gas to heat the air during the discharge
September 2020 | POWER
cycle. " This negatively impacts round-trip
efficiency, and the use of a fossil fuel results
in associated carbon emissions and
higher operating costs, " Hydrostor said.
" Second, since conventional CAES facilities
require very large underground caverns,
the technology could only be sited in
very select locations with uncommon geology
[typically salt formations]. Given the
fuel reliance and siting limitations of conventional
CAES it would generally make
more economic sense to simply build a
natural gas fired generating facility where
needed on the grid. "
The Hydrostor A-CAES system " was
specifically designed to address both
of these limitations, " the company told
POWER. The company's co-founder,
Cameron Lewis, developed wind projects
and saw there would be a need for
a scalable long-duration energy storage
technology. Lewis, who also worked in
Alberta's oil and gas industry, looked at
the limitations of such a system and saw
the need to develop a fuel-free A-CAES
solution " that could be more readily sited
where the grid needs it. "
To reach that solution, A-CAES uses
only machinery and techniques already
proven at scale in the power, mining, and
oil and gas sectors " to develop a bankable
and highly scalable solution to one
of green energy's toughest problems. "
Lewis founded Hydrostor in 2010 along
with VanWalleghem. In the decade since,
the Hydrostor team has developed and
demonstrated the A-CAES technology,
optimized its design, and built up its project
delivery capabilities. The company
has its eye on building its first large-scale
(200-MW or larger) facility that will work
with global grid applications.
Hydrostor said,
" A-CAES provides
low-cost bulk long-duration storage like
pumped hydro, but has the key ability to
be flexibly sited where the grid needs it,
allowing the targeting of high-value [and
immediately available] grid applications
like transmission deferral and fossil plant
replacement. " The company said the
technology " operates similarly to a conventional
natural gas plant but is entirely
non-emitting-it can be quickly ramped
up or down while its rotating turbomachinery
provides valuable inertia and synchronous
generation that stabilizes the
grid and contributes to power quality. "
Providing Value to the Grid
The company said the technology's ability
to provide synchronous storage capacity,
and its flexible siting, is valuable to grid
operators-a benefit that outweighs the
www.powermag.com
POWER POINTS
Winning Attributes
✔ Technology. The Goderich facility
is the world's first commercially
contracted adiabatic CAES. The
facility achieves fossil fuel-free
operation thanks to Hydrostor's
proprietary thermal storage
technology.
✔ Energy Advancement. Proving
out A-CAES's commercial viability
represents a major step forward
toward ensuring the longterm
cost-effectiveness of the
electricity grid as it continues
to transition to newer resources
and needs. The technology
addresses the downsides of
incumbent technologies and has
the characteristics required to play
a major role in the integration of
renewables and the phasing out of
fossil fuels.
✔ Community Involvement. NRStor
and Hydrostor engaged with the
community through two open
houses and all levels of government
(municipal, provincial, and federal)
to make this project a reality. This
involved developing provincial
standards for CAES with the
Ministry of Natural Resources and
Forestry to support the permitting
and reporting requirements for
CAES in Ontario.
impact of slightly lower round-trip efficiency.
Hydrostor noted that as a long-duration
technology this is less of a concern, and
that as more renewable energy is added to
the grid, the cost of the power is lowered,
" which in turn makes the cost of inefficiency
less of a burden financially. " Moreover,
cost-effective long-duration storage technologies
are increasingly needed to replace
conventional generating capacity as
grids worldwide continue to decarbonize.
Hydrostor said A-CAES is more costeffective
than batteries at scale, with a
50-plus-year asset life and " is ideally suited
to providing the long-duration storage
resource necessary for decarbonizing
the grid. This remains true for many applications
even with long-term forecasts of
cost reductions in lithium-ion batteries. " ■
-Darrell Proctor is associate
editor for POWER.
23
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POWER September 2020

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