The increasing deployment of renewable energy sources highlights the urgent need for large-scale, efficient, and low-cost storage solutions to manage intermittency and ensure reliable power supply. While lithium-ion batteries have seen dramatic cost reductions, their production carries a significant carbon footprint and environmental impact, motivating the search for alternatives.
Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES) offers a promising pathway by using surplus electricity—often from wind farms—to compress air, which can later be expanded to generate power. Existing prototypes have demonstrated capacities of several hundred megawatts, but challenges remain in conserving thermal energy during compression, mitigating heat leakage, optimizing materials, integrating with power electronics, and ensuring seamless grid connection.
This comprehensive reference provides a systematic overview of CAES technology. Following an introduction to motivations and principles, the book covers key components before examining the main system types in order of maturity: diabatic, adiabatic, and isothermal. Contributions from industry experts share practical experiences with major existing systems and prototypes, while additional chapters address economic considerations, power electronics, rotating machinery, and offshore applications.
Valuable for researchers in academia and industry, this work will also benefit energy storage manufacturers, utilities, advanced students, and policy experts engaged in building sustainable power systems.
