A compressed air energy storage (CAES) project in Hubei, China, has come online, with 300MW/1,500MWh of capacity. The 5-hour duration project, called Hubei Yingchang, was built in two years with a total investment of CNY1.95 billion (US$270 million) and uses abandoned salt mines in the Yingcheng area of Hubei, China’s sixth-most populous province.
Recently, a major breakthrough has been made in the field of research and development of the Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES) system in China, which is the completion of integration test on the world-first 300MW expander of advanced CAES system marking the smooth transition from development to production.
The $207.8 million energy storage power station has a capacity of 300 MW/1,800 MWh and uses an underground salt cave. Chinese developer ZCGN has completed the construction of a 300 MW compressed air energy storage (CAES) facility in Feicheng, China's Shandong province. The company said the storage plant is the world's largest CAES system to date.
The successful development of the 300MW compressed air expander stands as a significant milestone in domestic compressed air energy storage domain. Not only does it mark a turning point for advanced compressed air energy technology, but it also propels the nation's capabilities to unprecedented height.
The facility can store more than 132 million kWh of electricity per year. The country's largest operational CAES system is currently a 60 MW plant built by Chinese state-owned energy group Huaneng, Tsinghua University, and China National Salt Industry Group in Changzhou, Jiangsu Province.
It is the largest grid-connected CAES project of its size in the world, engineering firm China Energy Engineering Corporation claimed in its announcement of the project (or specifically, the first in the world of that scale). The project is owned by China Energy Construction Digital Group and State Grid Hubei Integrated Energy Services Co.