Liquid Air - The future of energy?

[watercooled]

It would be used for energy storage, so energy produced at times of lower demand can be stored and then used during higher demand, like what pumped storage is currently used for - excess energy is used to pump water uphill to the top reservoir, then during high/peak demand it can be used to rapidly add power to the grid. It takes time and is fairly inefficient for a thermal plant to change its output, i.e. maybe hours, and excess capacity (excess steam) has to be bled off/wasted until it's needed. A PS site can be ready in seconds and can match the capacity of a fairly large thermal plant.

[Pob255]

Demand is the point, this is much like the Dinorwig power station in wales https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station
These peak power stations do make a lot of sense when combined with a high level of nuclear power, such systems and stations are used in other countries with higher dependence on nuclear power.
If we generated far more power through renewable means such as wave, tidal and solar then again this sort of power storage is needed because wave, tidal and solar power are all environmental dependent production so will not correspond to demand patterns.

It the thing that make the burning of fossil fuels so good, it's cheap because you have easy on demand production and easy storage.

[AETAaAS]

Citroen has already made plans for something like this; http://www.psa-peugeot-citroen.com/e...system-article

The concept is interesting but for both I wonder about the safety. If you want to store more energy, you will have to compress to higher pressures. You don't want to be in a crash and have what is in effect, a bomb under your car. Or in the case of the OP, a bomb in your house or garden shed (wherever you plan to keep it ).

IMO, the most probable storage technology of the future is very high capacity capacitors.

[watercooled]

And have an electrical bomb instead? Seriously, even shorting some charged input caps on a PC power supply is scary enough, let alone some higher capacity ones. Not that I'm against the concept of using some form of capacitors for energy storage (although they're still some way off even coming close to battery energy density) but they're by no means completely safe. In fact, high-density energy storage, by its very nature, tends to come with risks.