Читать книгу Business Trends in Practice - Бернард Марр, Bernard Marr - Страница 38

The challenge with renewable solutions is that we need energy 24 hours a day, yet sometimes there's simply no wind or sun, a problem known as “intermittency.” What's more, peak demand times may not coincide with peak energy production times. This means we need to find ways to store the energy produced, so that energy captured can be transmitted and used later. Currently, there's no effective way to store the electricity produced by renewable technologies for any real length of time. But this is one area where exciting changes are happening, such as the Advanced Clean Energy Storage scheme in Utah, a hydrogen-based renewable energy storage complex.⁷ Or there's Swiss startup Energy Vault, which is developing energy storage technology for intermittent renewable energy sources, inspired by pumped-storage plants that rely on the movement of water to generate power. Power-to-X – an umbrella term for processes that turn electricity into heat, hydrogen, or renewable synthetic fuels – may also play a role in solving the energy storage problem, and, in turn, accelerate the shift to renewables.⁸ So, too might distributed power generation (more on that later in the chapter).

There's also the uncomfortable fact that electric vehicles, solar panels, and wind turbines are using rare earth materials mined from the earth. China has a monopoly on these materials (see Chapter 1), meaning geopolitical challenges could play an increasing role in the energy sector.⁹