近些年，Iowa Storage energy Park Agency一直在考虑是否进行一个价值4亿美元的270MW的压缩空气储能项目。
ISEPA必须首先考虑这个案例的商业性。在第一阶段，ISEPA进行了压缩空气储能与一个投资回收期为20年的以燃气为燃料的联合循环电厂的经济性对比研究。尽管目前的燃气价格较低，但该研究指出压缩空气储能电站还是具有成本竞争力的。
然而，仍旧需要开展很多项工作以最终决定是否进行该项目。包括增加一些经济性研究、一些昂贵的地质学测试等。
Technical feasibility is one thing, market viability is another. Both are needed to successfully implement bulk energy storage.
Proponents of compressed air energy storage, or CAES, can only point to two commercial facilities in operation today, one in Alabama and one in Germany. And they face traditional, competitive alternatives such as natural gas-fired, combined-cycle power plants.
Yet the rise of wind energy has generated a handful of CAES projects across the country, all of which are grappling with location-specific business cases and feasibility hurdles.
Consider the Iowa Stored Energy Park (ISEP), owned by the Iowa Stored Energy Plant Agency (ISEPA). It faces a schedule of testing, modeling and economic analysis, with decisions at each juncture, to determine whether to proceed with a $400 million CAES project.
Bob Schulte of Schulte Associates LLC, a management consulting firm, is executive director and project manager for ISEP. We spoke earlier this week.
Schulte, who has utility resource planning expertise, was hired a year ago to help ISEPA take a research and development project to commercialization. (Or determine alternatives.) Some 95 municipal utilities in four states (Iowa, Minnesota, North and South Dakota) have pursued the project as an alternative to building more power generation for their "intermediate" needs.
An initial economic analysis by RW Beck, funded by the Energy Storage Program in the Office of Electricity at the U.S. Department of Energy and issued in January, compared the business case for CAES with alternatives such as a new, natural gas-fired, combined-cycle generation unit in the Midwest Independent System Operator (MISO) area. The results encouraged stakeholders to continue with technical tests.