Why China Built the World’s Largest Air Battery

Lithium-ion batteries are great for about 4 hours of storage. After that, the price stops making sense. So China built an alternative out of thin air: the world’s largest compressed air battery, a salt cavern energy storage system with no lithium and no fuel burned to get the power back out.

The pitch is that it beats lithium at long-duration energy storage. But run the math on how long it actually lasts, and the answer comes out to 4 hours too, exactly where lithium already wins. So is China’s giant air battery actually solving the long-duration problem? Or is it just an expensive peaker plant that happens to run on air?

What Potential Would We Have in Indonesia?

What about Indonesia? The Pongkor Gold Mine in West Java would have the highest potential among the Indonesian options for an engineering conversion. The Pongkor mine is generally considered the most suitable candidate among the Indonesian choices for such a conversion. Mining Frontier – Grasberg Open Pit, Indonesia

The Rock: Pongkor is carved into hard, volcanic bedrock. This type of rock is naturally self-supporting and highly impermeable, making it potentially suitable for underground energy storage applications.
Hydrostor – What Lies Beneath: Unearthing a CAES
ResearchGate – Pongkor, West Java, Indonesia: A Pliocene Supergene-Enriched Epithermal Au-Ag-Mn Deposit

The Structure: Pongkor uses traditional tunnel and underground room methods. This leaves stable, open cavities that engineers could potentially seal with concrete and steel liners to hold high-pressure compressed air or water.
eScholarship – Compressed Air Energy Storage
ResearchGate – Stability and Tangential Strain Analysis of Large-Scale CAES Cavern

Geography: Because Pongkor sits in a mountainous region, it has natural elevation changes that could support the development of upper and lower water reservoirs for underground pumped-hydro energy storage.
Frontiers in Earth Science – Underground Pumped Storage Hydropower