Furthermore, the need for a large air reservoir is not an barrier. Geologies suitable for compressed air energy storage including depleted gas fields, salt domes and saline aquifers are widely available. A wind/compressed air plant is being planned now for Iowa

http://www.isepa.com/

There are many options for energy storage. These have been shown to have great promise for addressing the challenges posed by inttermitent generation in Ireland

http://www.sei.ie/uploadedfiles/FundedProgrammes/REHC03001FinalReport.pdf

further information on compressed air energy storage coupled to wind power can be found here:

http://www.princeton.edu/~cmi/research/Capture/captureppr.shtml

this technology has the potential for very widespread deployment on a global scale. And new technologies for storing energy are appearing every day.

We don’t have the luxury of saying we will use plugin hybrids and demand side management for dealing with wind *instead* of storage. we need to deploy all strategies on large scale as quickly as possible

There are a few compressed air storage plants in the world but they depend on having a large airtight cavern to store the air and therefore are not a possibility for Ireland as we don’t have a suitable cave/mine.

As far as I know Compressed Air Energy Storage is not used by anyone to regenerate electricity directly (except in some data centres). It has been used as part of an efficiency improvement in the combustion of Gas.

If the price of electricity drops, a company with refrigeration can lower the temp on their thermostats, sucking in cheap electricity.

Then when electricity increases in price they can up the temp on the thermostats (effectively turning off the compressors) and allow the temp in the freezers to drift back up again.

This way the company is preferentially freezing using cheap electricity and using the chilled goods as a cheap energy store.

Does that make more sense?