This article has been retracted: please see Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/withdrawalpolicy). This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor-in-Chief. The article duplicates significant parts of a paper that had already appeared in, A review of energy storage technologies for wind power applications Volume 16, Issue 4, May 2012, Pages 2154–2171. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2012.01.029 Re-use of any data should be appropriately cited. As such this article represents a severe abuse of the scientific publishing system. The scientific community takes a very strong view on this matter and apologies are offered to readers of the journal that this was not detected during the submission process.