The push to store renewable energy in massive salt caverns
On a plain in western Utah, two massive caverns—each roughly big enough to house the Empire State Building—are being hollowed out of rock salt a mile underground. Salt caverns like these are emerging as one possible solution to the question of how to store solar and wind energy for later use. It’s a three-step process.
First, electricity from solar and wind farms is used to produce hydrogen. Then the hydrogen is stored in caverns like those scheduled to be completed next year at the Advanced Clean Energy Storage project in Delta, Utah. Finally, the hydrogen can be used as a green substitute for climate-warming fossil fuels in uses ranging from power generation to steel manufacture and shipping.
A number of companies in the U.S. and Europe have started to invest in or seriously study salt-cavern projects in the past few years, with government subsidies for clean energy spurring them on. Countries around the globe are building huge amounts of wind and solar energy capacity.
In the U.S., around 21% of power generated comes from renewable sources now, but the government is aiming for a zero-carbon power grid by 2035, with heavy reliance on renewables to achieve that goal. The problem is that renewable power generation can fluctuate a lot depending on the time of day or year. Solar-panel output, for instance, stops when the sun sets, and in California can roughly halve in winter versus summer.
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