Outside the farming town of Delta, Utah, two companies are planning one of the world’s largest renewable energy storage hubs, with $504 million in backing from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).The federal government support was in the form of a loan.
The idea behind the Advanced Clean Energy Storage (ACES) project — a joint venture between Mitsubishi Power Americas and Magnum Development — is to harness enough on-demand renewable energy to power around 350,000 west coast homes nonstop for a month. The project involves producing hydrogen using solar and wind power, storing it in two large salt caverns, and deploying it as clean fuel when Utah is short on sun or wind.
At a time when President Biden is seeking to drive investment in American-made clean energy, while reducing the U.S.’s reliance on China for the technologies of the future, ACES seems like a poster-child for domestic energy innovation.
But there’s a catch: for ACES, the vital technological compon
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