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Originally Posted by Old Mechanic
And how far will your Insight go on the stored energy alone? Maybe a mile?
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Actually the Insight won't go any distance at all on the stored energy alone (barring some IMHO stupid tricks), because it's not designed to do that. But how far will some hybrid, like a Volt, that is designed to run on the electric system alone, go? (About 50 miles, per Google.) How much would a hydraulic system to store that much energy weigh? And how much complexity is added if you want to replenish that stored energy from say your home PV system?
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Doubling or more the replenishment capacity of that energy reserve, without a battery...
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Except you're running up against the laws of physics when you try to store energy in compressed gas. You can only store just so much (the equations are easy to find), and that amount is much less than can be stored as chemical energy. You also need a strong container if you're going to work at high pressures (think scuba tanks), and a volume of hydraulic fluid equal to that of the uncompressed gas. And unless you have well-insulated pressure vessels, you're going to lose a significant fraction of your energy as heat.
The long-term problem is that hydraulic storage is pretty close to those physical limits already, while electrochemical storage has a great deal of room for improvement.