A plant in a former salt mine in Goderich, Ont., billed as the
world s first emission-free compressed air facility. It can feed 10 megawatts of power into the grid for up to five hours.
A smaller demonstration that
Flywheels
Flywheels (or rotors) spin at very high rates (up to 50,000 revolutions per minute), typically in a vacuum so air friction doesn t slow them down. Power is stored as kinetic energy by using a motor to accelerate the flywheels, and energy can be discharged by reversing the process so the flywheel drives a motor or some other electrical generation device.
While this can happen very quickly compared to other types of energy storage, flywheels are not good for long-term storage, but work well to balance supply and demand on a short-term basis.
Sun 31 Jan 2021 07.30 EST
When Barcelona’s inhabitants emerged from a six-week lockdown at the end of April last year, they found that while the city had lain dormant, nature had been busy transforming the streets and parks into a bucolic wilderness.
“The parks were shut, so there was no pressure on them from humans or dogs and no gardening was carried out,” says Margarita Parés, who heads the city’s biodiversity programme.
“It was spring and it rained a lot more than usual. The result was an explosion in plant growth, so there were more insects and more food for birds. And there were many more butterflies, as they are a species that reacts very quickly to changes in the environment.”