Changeable weather and seasons mean that grids reliant on renewable energy sources risk intermittent supply. New ways to store generated power would help
would be a help. But it is not a complete cure. “I don’t think that we can manage…the European grid so that we always have, at the right time, enough [zero-carbon] energy to serve all Europe,” says Frank Reyer, Amprion’s operations manager. The Bay of Biscay may be blustery while the Baltic is becalmed, but wind turbines off the Atlantic coast of France cannot be expected to make good all of Germany’s shortfall. “France needs energy as well,” says Mr Reyer.
Batteries are increasingly important to help over short time frames; grids relying on renewables are ever more dependent on them. But it would be unfeasibly expensive to use batteries to provide storage on the scale required to make good weeks of serious supply shortfall.Many grids have access to “pumped-hydro” plants in which water from a reservoir is used to drive turbines when extra power is needed and pumps then refill the reservoir when power is plentiful.
Mr Reyer believes that this kind of “power-to-gas” will be crucial for Germany during periods of post-fossil-fuel. What is more, hydrogen made this way could replace fossil fuels in other applications, too, such as steel-making and fertiliser manufacture. But that depends on there being both a lot more renewable, or nuclear, energy available with which to make the hydrogen, and on there being yet bigger grids to move that energy to the places where it is needed.
Grid hydrogen would not, at present, be as green as that made directly from renewable energy at the point of production. But the greener the grid gets the greener the hydrogen gets. When countries reach the goal of an emissions-free grid, hydrogen made using its power will be emissions-free too.
Belgique Dernières Nouvelles, Belgique Actualités
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