Seamus Garvey professor of Engineering at the University of Nottingham proposes building 1000 ft wind turbines to compress air and store it underwater in bags. The turbine blades contain weights that compress the air as they slide back and fourth. This reduces the need to have all the energy concentrated in center, and allows the production of 100 MW. Present electric wind turbines are limited to 5 MW. In the underwater storage bag system, the water acts as the pressure vessel. The bags storage system is conceptually simple but requires high strength materials to keep large volumes of air on the sea floor. A prototype of this energy storage system has been tested recently.
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