One of the biggest problems facing solar energy is variability. Solar output waxes and wanes based on variables beyond human control. The amount of sunlight reaching the solar panel on any given day depends on the weather and season. Complicating matters are the times of the day when energy demand is higher compared to peak production hours. Solar panels work hard to heat the house when we all come home and turn on the lights, start cooking, and when the sun goes down.
Fundamentally, energy volatility is the enemy of energy security. Therefore, a successful green energy transition must find a way to anticipate and deal with predictable fluctuations in renewable energy production, as well as unforeseen circumstances, especially when climate change begins and extreme weather events occur. global warming.
Moreover, this flexibility poses major challenges to our aging grids, which are not designed with energy security and flexible energy sources in mind . Our electricity grids are designed to accommodate what is known as baseload energy, such as fossil fuels and nuclear power, to maintain constant production and meet energy demand throughout the year as needed. The season.
One solution to these problems is long-term energy storage, an emerging field with great growth potential . We currently rely on lithium-ion batteries to store excess renewable energy during production hours and feed it back to the grid when demand exceeds supply. The problem is that lithium-ion batteries only hold power for a few hours, and we really need to be able to hold power for all seasons. However, long-term energy storage solutions are still under research and development.
Other scientists are trying to find ways to convert renewable energy into mainstream energy. Because this lens defies the laws of nature on Earth, they look at the stars. By sending solar arrays into space, they record a constant supply of light without the interference of Earth's weather and daylight hours. The idea of sending solar farms into space has been around for 100 years, but it's still science fiction.
Thanks to increasingly affordable infrastructure and cheap space launches, a new space race is starting around the world. A space-based solar power system developed by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) is expected to begin testing later this month. Another European Space Agency (ESA) initiative is preparing to become fully operational by 2025. Meanwhile, China announced plans to launch a megawatt-scale demonstration unit into low-Earth orbit in 2028. In the year by 2030," Nature reported .
These plans are ambitious to say the least. To be habitable, the space sun must be spread wide. Plans for such orbital solar farms are kilometers wide and will be built about 36,000 kilometers (about 24,000 miles) into the Earth's atmosphere. Receivers on Earth that receive energy from space must be larger than the solar farms themselves. These real estate needs alone are a major obstacle to the implementation of these plans as ground-based solar parks have already faced serious land use problems .
The timelines offered by competing research groups around the world may be a bit optimistic, but certainly not impossible. "There is nothing strange about this new physics," says James Carpenter, who currently conducts feasibility studies for ESA. "Economically, it can be compared to, for example, nuclear energy." Indeed, some argue that the real economic commitment is not to invest in space solar power. The technology offers great promise for global energy security and global decarbonisation at a time when these imperatives have never been more challenging.
By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com
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