[sandworm101]

It has its own issues, not the least of which is safety. There is lots of energy in compressed air, that's the point. I would look heavily into the risks of structural fatigue. A lithium ion battery might catch fire, but an "air battery" can go boom.

[alex_duf]

Given that anything that contains energy can go boom, I think of all of them this one doesn't sound too bad. Probably local casualties but no risk of cancer for the next century, or ground pollution for the next decades.

[verelo]

Isn’t this the issue with any large battery? Water in large volumes can cause a lot of damage too. I suspect it’s hard to find a large battery that isn’t scary when mishandled.

[learc83]

Compressed air is much more dangerous than most other storage methods though. The failure mode tends to release stored energy very quickly.

[throwaway0a5e]

Joules are joules. A "grid scale" compressed air tank going pop is going to do a lot more damage in the immediate vicinity but won't do anything 50mi away. You can't say the same thing about a dam burst.

Just because it's dangerous in a way you're not used to doesn't mean it's more dangerous.

[learc83]

>Joules are joules.

When talking about battery failure how quickly the energy is released is important.

>A "grid scale" compressed air tank going pop is going to do a lot more damage in the immediate vicinity but won't do anything 50mi away. You can't say the same thing about a dam burst.

If your comparing it to an entire dam, then your looking at underground storage of compressed gas in caverns. For that I agree both are dangerous in different ways.

But the context I was talking about was compressed air tanks which are more comparable to chemical batteries and gravity storage. Catastrophic failure of compressed air tanks is generally going to be more destructive than many other similar alternatives.

>Just because it's dangerous in a way you're not used to doesn't mean it's more dangerous.

A large lithium battery is much less likely to level several buildings than an air tank storing a similar amount of energy. I'm not saying that the dangers of compressed air can't be engineered around, but by almost any reasonable, objective metric you could come up with, compressed air is more dangerous.

[sandworm101]

Yes. Look for the vids of scuba tanks gone wrong. I'd rather drive around with a propane tank in my trunk than a 5000psi air tank.

[csharptwdec19]

Depends on the materials...

TBF I'm pretty comfortable with a proper steel tank.

But, nowadays I'd be afraid to use any of the fiber wrapped ones. I remember in the middle of the 2000s when a lot of new companies jumped into the Fiber-wrapped tank market... and shortly thereafter there were a notable number of recalls in/around the bonding between the fiber and metal layers of the tanks.

And, mind you, this was all in the paintball industry, which was a field where many did not have an understanding of the dangers of a piece of fiberglass with 800-5000PSI pushing it somewhere.

Happened more than once:

phone rings

Boss working at field nearby: "Hey, someone might be coming across the street to try to fill a tank that we refused to fill because it was (damaged/out of hydro)"

Me: "Yeah, I turned them away 5 minutes ago."

Customer walks in

Customer: "Hey the field said they were out of air but otherwise they would fill this."

[throwaway0a5e]

Literally anything you store energy in is going to have the same safety issue. You can muck around with space efficiency and peak wattage but at the end of the day you've got the same amount of joules that want out and if they get out in an uncontrolled manner it will be bad.

[woodandsteel]

This plant is not using compressed air, it's using liquified air.