The liquid air energy storage demonstration project|liquid air energy storage demonstration project is among the national pilot projects for new types of energy storage, according to the Golmud city government. According to pv magazine, the facility is in the Haixi Mongol and Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in the northwestern Chinese province of Qinghai and was developed by state-owned China Green Development Investment Group together with the Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Construction began in July 2023. With a storage capacity of 600 megawatt-hours, the facility is designed to supply electricity continuously for ten hours.
According to the city government, the facility is intended to store electricity from wind and solar power when demand is low and feed it back into the grid at peak demand to balance fluctuations in renewable generation. According to pv magazine, the facility is in Qinghai's Qaidam Basin, which is rich in renewable energy.
How liquid air stores electricity
During charging, surplus electricity drives a three-stage centrifugal compressor that compresses purified air to around 7 megapascals, according to pv magazine, while the resulting compression heat is stored as water at temperatures of up to 195 degrees. The compressed air then cools to about minus 194 degrees Celsius, liquefies and is stored at near-atmospheric pressure in insulated cryogenic tanks. During discharge, the liquid air is pressurized, reheated and vaporized; the expanding gas drives turbines that generate electricity, while the cold recovered during vaporization is stored for subsequent charging cycles. Because ordinary air serves as the working medium, the system requires no battery chemistry or underground storage caverns.
From a hundred-kilowatt trial to a megawatt facility
The technology dates back to experiments by researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who had previously demonstrated liquid air energy storage at a scale of 100 kilowatts, pv magazine reports. Ji Wei, chief engineer and lead expert at China Green Development's storage company, described a leap “from the scale of hundreds of kilowatts to the scale of tens of thousands of kilowatts,” according to the city government. According to Shengu, the company itself built the first-stage compressor: the impeller has a diameter of 2 meters, and the entire machine weighs more than 300 tonnes, which Shengu describes as the world's largest horizontally split centrifugal compressor. Britain is pursuing a different approach to expanding long-duration storage: according to its Clean Flexibility Roadmap, published in August 2025, the British government introduced a cap-and-floor mechanism for long-duration electricity storage, and its Clean Power 2030 Action Plan of December 2024 envisages doubling to tripling clean flexibility capacity to 51 to 66 gigawatts by 2030.
Shengu put the service life of the compressor unit it supplied at at least 30 years and at least 20,000 start-stop cycles, though this is the manufacturer's design specification and not operating performance already achieved. A statement published in August 2024 by the Northwest Regulatory Bureau of the National Energy Administration describes a safety inspection at the construction site of a China Green Development liquid air and compressed air energy storage project, without explicitly identifying the project as the facility now connected to the grid or providing a company statement on the safety measures requested at the time. Regardless of the unresolved issues, the basic technical information provided by the city government, Shengu and pv magazine on cryogenic liquefaction at minus 194 degrees Celsius is consistent across all sources reviewed.
Third, none of the sources names the specific facility against which the city government and developer measure their claim to have the world's largest liquid air energy storage facility. According to the city government, the grid connection in Golmud is a technical advance in long-duration storage of renewable energy.