The Iowa Stored Energy Plant Agency (ISEPA) has announced the termination of the Iowa Stored Energy Park (ISEP) project because the site is not suitable.
ISEP was a proposed 270 MW, $400 million compressed-air energy-storage (CAES) electric generation facility that was to be located in Iowa.
The project would have stored wind and other resources available on the electric transmission grid during off-peak weeknight and weekend hours as compressed air in a sandstone aquifer geologic structure 3,000 feet underground.
The compressed air would then be used during higher value, on-peak hours on weekdays to generate electricity and deliver it back to the grid when it was needed most, according to the company. The project was scheduled to be completed in 2015.
However, the geology studies of the project site show the storage reservoir is not suitable for the scale of project that was envisioned. While the CAES project concept and potential long-term economics are sound, due to geology limitations specific to the Dallas Center site, the ISEPA members have easier, less expensive and less risky conventional alternatives to meet their customers' future electric needs, according to the agency.
‘We have learned a great deal about what it takes to do utility-scale energy storage and coordinate it with regional wind energy resources,’ says Bob Schulte of Schulte Associates LLC, a management consulting firm retained by ISEPA to lead the due diligence assessment of the project.
The economic studies performed for ISEP show that an innovative CAES project like this can be cost-effective compared to conventional generation alternatives, and supportive of additional wind energy development in the region.’
