[ storage ]
H-Battery : the missing link for stabilising renewable energy
The H-Battery represents a breakthrough in renewable energy storage , building on the alkaline fuel cell ( AFC ) technology previously used on NASA ’ s Apollo and Columbia missions . Despite its initial success , AFC has been largely forgotten in terrestrial applications due to its sensitivity to CO 2
, which compromises its performance on Earth . ShipTown has now pioneered a solution that overcomes this limitation , allowing the AFC to tolerate CO 2 contamination . Additionally , the H-Battery is a reversible system that functions as both a fuel cell and an electrolysis cell , with a combined round-trip efficiency of around 50 %.
By Karsten Schibsbye , Founder , ShipTown A / S
The renewable energy challenge
Renewable energy sources such as solar and wind have become the cheapest form of energy generation . However , their intermittent nature poses a significant challenge to grid stability . Nuclear power , while stable , cannot be easily ramped up or down to meet fluctuations in supply and demand . As shown in Figure 1 , which illustrates electricity supply and demand in Great Britain during the first week of July 2020 , there were several days of surplus generation followed by periods of deficit . This imbalance highlights the need for large-scale energy storage solutions to buffer the intermittency of renewable energy generation .
Fig . 1 . Time series of electricity demand with generation from nuclear , wind , and solar in Great Britain for the first week of July in 2020 . Source : Oliver Schmidt and Iain Staffell , Monetizing Energy Storage : A Toolkit to Assess Future Cost and Value , p . 8 , Oxford University Press , 2023 , distributed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 .
16 Hydrogen Tech World | Issue 19 | December 2024