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LightSail’s Secret Plan to Slash the Costs of Compressed Air Energy

Storage

“We’re storing pressure, and we’re storing heat. We can change those proportions.”
by Jeff St. John
April 28, 2015

LightSail Energy, the energy storage startup backed by some of the country’s most prominent
venture capitalist tech billionaires, has a plan to slash the costs of building its above-ground
compressed air storage systems. But it’s not divulging details of exactly how it’s going to do it.
Danielle Fong, LightSail’s 27-year-old co-founder and chief scientist, revealed the plan last week in
a presentation at an event hosted by The Atlantic magazine in San Francisco. Amidst her slides, one
stood out -- a cost comparison between two competing battery technologies, LightSail’s current
version of its technology and a mystery “V2” version now under development.

This cellphone photo is a little blurry, but direct your attention to the last two cost columns,
representing LightSail's current technology and its next-generation technology, and the orange-
colored portion of the columns, which stand for capital costs. The “V2” technology, at the far right
of the slide, shows an enormous drop in LightSail’s capital costs, compared to its existing
technology.
“We’re not 100 percent there yet, but we see a clear path to getting there,” Fong said. But she
wouldn’t say much about this huge drop in capital costs when I asked her about it at last week’s
event, beyond offering this rather cryptic comment on how LightSail intended to reach its target:
“One way to think about how we’re storing power -- storing energy -- in compressed air with the
water spray is that we’re storing both pressure, and we’re storing heat. We can change those
proportions.”
LightSail has raised more than $42 million from French Energy giant Total, Peter Thiel, Bill Gates,
Khosla Ventures, and Innovacorp, in pursuit of a compressed air energy storage (CAES) system that
doesn’t rely on underground caverns as a storage medium, as the world’s only existing commercial
CAES systems do. Last month, another above-ground CAES startup, SustainX, abandoned those
plans in announcing that it was merging with General Compression, a startup that’s using
underground salt caverns to store compressed air.
LightSail says its use of spun carbon-fiber tanks has allowed it to solve the cost problems faced by
SustainX, which was using traditional steel tanks. It also claims that it has come up with a way to
capture and store both the mechanical energy and the thermal energy used in compressing air by
injecting a cool water mist into the compression chamber as the air is compressed, reducing the heat
that is generated as air is compressed. When the captured pressurized air is released back through
the system, the heated water is re-infused into it, allowing that heated air to return more energy.

In an interview after her on-stage presentation, Fong declined to comment further on how changing
proportions of heat and pressure in LightSail’s carbon-fiber storage tanks could yield such a radical
cost decrease. Instead, she pointed to projections of a 2x decline in carbon fiber costs, as well as an
improvement in the economics of volume production of the engines to convert its compressed air to
electrical energy, as the driving factors.
“There is another pathway, but none of that is public,” Fong wrote in a follow-up email this week.
On further questioning, she replied that “basically there are two very good pathways down to very
low cost. One is a set of incremental advances to compressed air, but another one scales down
arbitrarily (e.g., to smaller than home scale).”
In September, LightSail published a patent application that hinted at how it might be seeking to
move forward on those pathways. Titled “Energy Recovery From Compressed Gas,” it describes the
following innovation:
An expansion system utilizes external combustion of its residual warm exhaust air, in order to heat
incoming compressed air. The heat of this external combustion is communicated to the incoming
compressed air through a heat exchanger. The expansion system may be incorporated into an energy
storage device also featuring a compressed air storage unit supplied by a compressor. Where the
stored supply of compressed air is depleted, the energy storage device may continue to supply
electricity on demand through operation as a heat engine, with the compressor being driven directly
(e.g., on a same rotating shaft) or indirectly (via generated electrical power) by the expansion
system. Multiple expanders of the same or different types (e.g., rotating, reciprocating), may be
utilized in parallel and/or in series (e.g., multiple stages) depending upon the particular application.
Multi-stage embodiments featuring internal combustion in low pressure stages, may be particularly
suited for placement in vehicles.
Fong told the audience at last week’s event that LightSail has tested the high-pressure portion of its
system, and is developing the low-pressure portion in preparation for field trials to take place next
year. LightSail has two field projects announced to date -- a California Energy Commission-funded
project to store solar power at a Ventura County naval base, and a Nova Scotia, Canada-based
project to store energy from a wind turbine.
The end goal, Fong said, is an energy storage technology that doesn’t suffer the long-term
degradation and efficiency losses of electrochemical batteries. Replacing batteries with the proven
simplicity and durability of engines could bring energy storage costs within reach for mass
deployment in support of intermittent wind and solar power, she said.
In one sense, LightSail is positioning itself against energy storage projects using batteries of all
descriptions, including lithium-ion, advanced lead-acid, sodium sulfur, aqueous zinc and flow
batteries. Companies ranging from Tesla to AES Energy Storage are seeking to prove cost-
effectiveness for applications ranging from short-duration grid frequency regulation and building
demand management, to multi-hour energy shifting to support a more renewables-rich energy
system. LightSail laid off a small number of employees last year, and has missed its initial
commercial launch timeline, so it has some catching up to do to prove it has a feasible alternative.
But in another sense, LightSail is in common cause with other energy storage technologies seeking
to allow renewable energy to grow to scale, Fong said. If the world is to replace the fossil fuel-fired
power plants that are the largest single source of carbon dioxide emissions responsible for climate
change, that needs to happen in the next decade and a half, she said -- meaning we’re going to need
all the technology breakthroughs we can get.

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