If you charge or discharge Lithium polymer or lithuium ion batteries "wrong" they explode too.

I wouldn't want to be near a flywheel that stores 360 Wh of energy when it breaks.

I imagine something similar could be done. It's not like there are zero safety mechanisms with compressed air.

TNT has about 1/10 the energy density of petrol or diesel. Capacitors have lower capacities than batteries.

I'm not sure they ever explode in a bomb like way?

No different than people who have LP tanks outside their homes. Or fuel oil tanks buried in their yards. Or coal bins in their basements. Or natural gas lines coming their house. Or pretty much any other storage method except a dam for your water wheel, but even that can burst and flood your home.

Worst case with compressed air is a total disintegration of the tank, the room it's in, and the rest of the house along with the occupants.

There are things you can do to make it safer, like installing the tank at the bottom of a pool or buried under a few feet of dirt, but they add complications and expense.

Spoiler alert: State of the art is 30x better

Unfortunately, these real-life steampunks (not cosplay kids) usually also would rather spend time working on their projects and not documenting them, so there's not very much on the internet compared with the number of people active in the hobby.

Keep an eye out at county fairs and small town carnivals and rodeos. They usually show up.

Do you have the equivalent of 50 LED bulbs (60W equivalent [1]) burning at a time? Do you consider that careful usage?

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Philips-Classic-Glass-Non-Dimmable-Li...

Beyond that, this is being pushed in the article as a rural/off-grid approach. For urban residential, it makes a lot more sense to centralize storage and run houses off a regular grid, than to try to make each house an independent entity.

In the medium run, we need to shift the grid itself from the current baseline+peak model to a solar+storage model (rolling wind into this), with distributed metering on the storage grid. Capture solar/wind power when the sun shines and the wind blows, and sell it when consumption outstrips supply, with pricing set dynamically on a distributed network.

Once you have that, for on-grid purposes, we'll probably see a diverse world of storage - car batteries, compressed air, industrial battery sites, water storage, thermal storage, etc.