Electricity is the lifeblood of any city, and with more people living in urban centers today than rural areas the significance of that is huge. 

If there’s a sudden and massive power outage, transport, health care and business could all come to a stop. Let alone the ability to charge your phone, which I use to shop, communicate, and find my way around with a map. 

China is on the way to reducing carbon with new sources of energy like wind and solar filling in the gaps for what we need to live at speed. But even clean energy creates an environmental impact. 

In winter, for example, wind power can’t generate when turbine blades freeze. Also, thicker cloud cover and thus less sunlight affect the ability to generate power through solar.  

So, what can we do? Well, as it turns out, we may need look no further than the air in Guizhou. 

Guizhou is a part of China known for its natural landscape and for the many ethnic communities that live among the mountains. 

Here, you’ll find a 10 megawatt air storage site in a place called Bijie where this novel form of energy has been plugged into the grid for some time. 

Bijie is known for its many landmarks including bridges, rivers and inscriptions that speak to its long history. But it’s creating a new future, too.  

This factory can generate 10MW of power with a storage capacity of 40kWh, much more than the needs of its own people and infrastructure.  

But it operates on a system that allows excess electricity to store safely and used when needed during peak demand periods or just when the weather turns cold. This way, you can conserve energy while cutting down on fossil fuels like coal. 

So, how is air actually transformed into electricity? 

Simply, the principle of compression and release is applied. When the demand for electricity is low, the air is compressed and stored by a compressor. And when demand goes up, high pressure air is gradually released to drive a generator. 

This process is able to generate 40,000 kWh of electricity a day, which meets the average needs of 3,000 households combined. 

Compression and release may not sound complex, but the R&D team behind it has its fair share of challenges. There are tens of thousands of components involved, of which 40% are standard parts and the remaining 60% are designed and operated by the R&D team itself. 

It took 4,000 hours of testing to achieve the system they had in mind. But now it can handle Bijie’s terrain where rolling hills are a logistical challenges in themselves. 

So far, the US and Germany have mastered similar tech of their own. But their energy conversion rates still hovers at 54% at best.  

Bijie is ahead of that on that performance level by some way at 64%. But wouldn’t it be great if we can all improve together so that meeting our needs, while caring for our natural world, becomes a point of unity?