Compressed-Air Energy Storage

Simon Holege asks: Is compressed-air energy storage (CAES) a serious alternative to using batteries for wind farms, etc.? Under what conditions can CAES be regarded as a viable technology for large scale energy storage?

I’ve been a believer in this subject for a long time, but at this point, I’m afraid that distributed storage using batteries, along the lines of what Elon Musk is undertaking, is about to win the day, vs. technologies like CAES that require huge scale to have any chance at being competitive.

OK, you might ask, so what about storage on a utility scale?  I suppose that CAES has a chance, but it’s hard to imagine that anything good is going to happen at the utility scale, given:

The decreasing level of relevance that our power utilities have as the years march by, and

The fact that our civilization seems a million miles away from figuring out how to distribute the cost of storage across the four constituencies that benefit from it (generation, transmission, distribution, and load).