Maximising Free Energy

Could liquid air energy storage be the key to electrification? Tank Storage Magazine investigates The UK government kicked off 2026 with a record-breaking auction for offshore wind. The 8.4GW secured would generate enough clean electricity to power the equivalent of over 12 million homes. Or, at least, it could if the country didn’t face a huge energy storage problem. Enter: Highview Power. The company that is looking to eliminate wind curtailment in the UK by storing excess energy as liquid air. So, how does it work? Highview’s chief market development officer, Gary Preece, explains: ‘Our technology can take the excess energy from renewables production and use it to drive a compressor. This compresses and refrigerates the air, turning it into a liquid state, which we then store.’ During the process, contaminants are stripped out and any heat that’s lost can be recovered and re-used in the regasification process. ‘Regasification then produces a lot of extreme cold, which we can then recover for use in the initial compression phase – it’s very much a closed loop,’ says Preece. The use of existing energy also improves the process’ efficiency by up to...