‘The holy grail’ of clean energy investment is pushing air underground

Tom Rand, author of Climate Capitalism, discusses his investment in Toronto-based Hydrostor, a company using compressed air, water and manmade underground caverns to store excess energy from the electricity grid, and deploy it back when needed. The technology is expected to play an important role as grids incorporate more intermittent sources, like wind and solar.

Rand said the technology is more cost effective than conventional batteries, and able to store energy longer.

“This is the holy grail for me of clean tech and climate tech,” Rand told Yahoo Finance Canada senior reporter Jeff Lagerquist. “If you can put grid-scale really cheap energy storage on the grid, and it's ubiquitous, then there's no ceiling in terms of the amount of solar and wind you can put on the grid either. Frankly [you can] solve the climate problem from an energy perspective.”

Jeff Lagerquist is a senior reporter at Yahoo Finance Canada. Follow him on Twitter @jefflagerquist.

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