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DAVID MARCUS: I can’t imagine running a data network without servers that stored data
or running a highway system without parking lots that stored cars. And yet that’s what
the grid has been trying to do.
General Compression is focused on building dispatchable wind power projects. There is
a river of wind, roughly just east of the Rockies, that comes down over the middle third
of the country. We believe that our storage technology can act like a dam in a hydro project
to capture that energy, store it and regulate it and let it out in such a way that it’s
useful and valuable for the production of electricity.
ERIC INGERSOLL: Our current technology works by squeezing air in a process that allows
us to remove the heat that’s generated while it’s being squeezed. This allows us to compress
the air with the minimum theoretical work. We then store the air in a salt cavern. When
the power is needed by the grid, we take the energy in that compressed air, and we expand
the air, putting back in some of the heat that was taken out.
MR. MARCUS: The folks at the Department of Energy and ARPA-E were looking in the grid’s
program for storage technologies that would enable the grid to be more reliable, smarter,
more responsive.
MR. INGERSOLL: ARPA-E came in at a very crucial time in our development. We wanted to build
a system that would enable a fully renewable project where, if you integrated our storage
system with a wind farm, you would have still a 100 percent carbon-free, 100 percent renewable
power generation plant.
MR. MARCUS: Investors were interested in the company, but hesitant about funding us further.
We received an award – a modest one, $750,000. It was a short project. We completed it in
four months. It ended up being the first project that was completed under any of the ARPA-E
programs, and we’re very proud of that.
MR. INGERSOLL: Having had an outside agency decide to fund us, develop their own analysis
of what the key risks were, and then work with us during the – to verify the accomplishment
of those milestones, and then to sort of pronounce that we had in fact successfully completed
that project gave outside investors a huge degree of confidence in our technology.
MR. MARCUS: We’ve since taken that 100-kilowatt device, and we have partnered with ConocoPhillips,
a leading energy company and built a 2-megawatt by 500-megawatt power project in West Texas
that is a full-scale demonstrator of our technology. Demonstrating that project has enabled us
to go forward with our commercial plans.
So our business plan is not to sell widgets. It’s not to sell gear to others. It’s
to use our technology to build power projects that feature wind turbines and our storage
technology so that we can offer large-scale, firm power contracts that are cost-competitive
with coal, gas and nuclear plants.
(END)