Lam Takhong, a pumped storage power plant in central Thailand
Natural gas prices have been steadily climbing since last summer, with the war in Ukraine increasing the pressure. Combined with efforts against climate change, it’s never been clearer that the world needs to move towards renewables.
However, there’s an obvious problem – most forms of renewables don’t produce energy on demand. The power needs to keep flowing even when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine.
According to power generation firm Drax, that means the amount of energy storage on the UK grid will need to expand from 3GW today to more than 30GW in the coming decades.
The words ‘power storage’ might make you think of batteries. However, there are big problems using such systems for large-scale storage. The development costs and end-of-life disposal of lithium-ion…