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Any reversible physical process is an energy storage technology.
An interesting take from Technology Connections.
In this one, he reminds us that simple management of heat in our homes can amount to a simple and immediately available method to distribute energy use from the hours of peak demand.
Crooked Timber says: "energy storage is a solvable problem [...] concerns about the variability of wind and solar power will come to nothing in the end".
Moving rocks up and down former mine shafts could be a workable energy storage system.
I liked some quotes in this article:
If you are going to teach science, you must give it in a historical context: you must stress how our current knowledge is the accumulation of course corrections. You must stress how it is a work in progress.
Given that science is fundamentally subversive, how could it emerge and survive? I believe that scientific thinking is part of a broader ideology that gives its bearers an evolutionary edge. Simply put, societies that make room for science have an edge. They build and deploy better technology. They adapt more quickly to change.
The European Clean Hydrogen Alliance brings together industry, national and local public authorities, civil society and other stakeholders. It is strongly anchored in the hydrogen value chain, covering renewable and low-carbon hydrogen from production via transmission to mobility, industry, energy, and heating applications.
Wärtsilä has modelled 145 countries and regions to find the optimal way to produce electricity from 100% renewable energy sources. The map illustrates how the power system of each of these regions would look like if they were to be optimally built from scratch, not considering the burden of existing power plants.
Nicely done interactive map, and quite fun to explore.
The optimisations presented in this map were calculated using a proprietary tool, but carried out in collaboration between Wärtsilä and LUT University's solar research group under the direction of professor of solar economy Christian Breyer.
Not sure if the data itself is published anywhere. Don't know why several outlets label this map "open access". Interactive, yes, openly accessible on the web, yes, but by that measure most any website would count as "open access".
The optimal capacity and energy mix are defined using a power system optimisation tool Plexos, which is a commercially used software developed by Energy Exemplar. Technologies and their parameters (costs, efficiencies, technical lifetime etc.) and conditions of each region (renewable profiles, load profiles etc.) are given to the software, after which the optimisation algorithm calculates the mix of technologies which provide the lowest cost for each region, but can still manage to serve energy demand reliably every hour of the year. We have used representative region-specific renewable profiles. For reliability purposes the system in both scenarios has been designed to sustain up to three consecutive days of low renewable production.
It's interesting to see how the Wärtsilä PR department has clearly been spreading the word around. News of this Atlas via
- Energy Egypt
- Cyprus Shipping News
- Green Building Africa
- Africa Business
- PV Europe
- Power Info Today
- Global Energy World
News of the research agreement via
How interconnections between national grids facilitate more renewable energy generation capacity.