A clean energy breakthrough could be buried deep beneath rural Utah

DELTA, Utah - If you know anything about solar and wind farms, you know they're good at generating electricity when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing, and not so good at other times.

Batteries can pick up the slack for a few hours. But they're less useful when the sun and wind disappear for days at a time - a problem the Germans call "dunkelflaute," meaning "dark doldrums."

Those long stretches of still, cloudy days are one of the main obstacles standing in the way of renewable energy fully replacing fossil fuels.

For Los Angeles, salt may be a solution.

One hundred miles south of Salt Lake City, a giant mound of salt reaches thousands of feet down into the Earth. It's thick, relatively pure and buried deep, making it one of the best resources of its kind in the American West.

Two companies want to tap the salt dome for compressed air energy storage, an old but rarely used technology that can store large amounts of power.

It would work like