When it comes to clean energy our minds typically revert to thinking about, “how we can produce energy in a cleaner way?” Such as using solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, nuclear power, etc. The problem with renewable energy, such as solar and wind, is that when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing you can’t use their electricity because their power source is in essence “turned off”. This is one of the main reasons that renewables can still be quite expense, because they aren’t operating 24/7 like a fossil fuel plant can. Another reason why renewables are so expensive is because when they do produce electricity a lot of it is wasted because there is no where to store the energy that they produce. The price point of renewables goes down when you can harvest electricity for more hours of the day, store it, and sell it to the grid.

Curtis VanWalleghem and his team at Hydrostor saw this massive gap in the market and asked themselves, “how can we fix this problem?” They realized that not only do we need more technology to make renewable energy easier but we need the economics on our side so people will be more inclined to support renewable energy because its cheaper then using fossil fuels. They realized that they could bring the price point of renewables down by storing the energy that they produce when the sun is shinning and the wind is blowing. Then, when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing they could use that stored energy to sell to the grid. The science behind Hydrostor’s Advanced Compressed Air Energy Storage (A-CAES) is simple, however, they are using the principles of physics in a beautiful and innovative way that no one has thought of to make energy cleaner and greener.

One take away from my conversation with Curtis that hit home for me was that we need to be more engaged in electing politicians who believe in clean energy and will actually do something about it and not just give us lip service about what they are going to do. We need to be thoughtful and investigate the politicians that are running and investigate their views on getting more renewable and alternative energies to market.

Listen in as Curtis shares some very insightful advice as to how we can make a difference and be missionaries versus mercenaries in the clean energy movement.