Storing Electricity Underground

Quidnet Energy wants to make solar and wind energy more accessible by turning abandoned oil and gas wells into energy storage vaults.

In a field in Central Texas, Aaron Mandell and his crew are running pumping equipment to bring a former oil and gas well back to life.

But they’re not trying to extract black gold. Instead, they are developing a way to turn abandoned oil and gas wells into vaults for storing electricity.

The concept behind Mandell’s startup, Quidnet Energy, sounds simple: pumping water deep into the earth to fill up the cracks in-between rocks that previously held fossil fuels.

When the pressurized water is released, it acts like a spring as it races through a turbine-generator above ground, powering it to produce electricity.

Mandell, co-founder and chairman of Quidnet, is part of a growing number of entrepreneurs in an emerging market to use batteries or other technologies to bank electricity when prices and demand are low, and discharge it when they are high.

The US market installed 221 megawatts of energy storage projects in 2015, up from the 65 megawatts added in 2014, according to GTM Research. The market research firm expects the annual installation to exceed 1 gigawatt in 2019.

The energy storage market is growing fast primarily because of the increasing amount of solar and wind energy being produced across the country, from rooftop solar panels to acres of wind turbines.

Storing solar and wind energy for later use circumvents a big disadvantage of these two types of low-carbon energy: they can’t always produce electricity whenever needed because demand fluctuates, reaching a peak in the early evening when people return home and turn on appliances or during hot summer months.

Utilities in states with more renewable energy are starting to pay for energy storage services or build their own. Just last week, AES Energy Storage said it will build two giant lithium-ion battery systems for San Diego Gas and Electric in California, which is the biggest solar energy state in the country.

“Our goal is to allow renewables like solar and wind to penetrate the power market at much larger percentages than we have today,” Mandell said.

Quidnet recently lined up a new round of venture capital, bringing the total amount they have raised to just over $1m. The company previously snagged a seed funding of $500,000 from Clean Energy Venture Group.

Quidnet’s other investors include Will and Jada Smith Foundation and the Sorenson Impact Foundation, both of which invested through Prime, a nonprofit advising foundations that want to put money into technology, which isn’t a familiar territory for philanthropic organizations.

Read full article at:  The Guardian