Energy revolution

Energy can be many things.

First of all, it is a fundamental tool of the physics. I  mean, as every (good) engineer, I have started to study engineering due to an authentic love for physics and math. It is quite normal in physics that, the more important the concept, the more difficult is to find a clear, synthetic and evident to everybody definition. It’s not a secondary matter. Einstein was used to say 

 “If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself”.

From high school, it is know that energy is something related to change in volume, velocity, position temperature etc. of a body. If you want to move a body, to heat up it, you have to spend something, that is energy. This was not perfectly clear to me for years. You can familiarize with this concept. After a certain time you interiorize it but it is still not perfectly clear. Where is the energy? Where does energy come from? And where does energy go to?

From an historical perspective, heat is one of the most important form of energy. Heat is closer to our common sense, easier to understand. If you have two bodies in contacts at different temperatures, then is evident to everybody that the hotter body heats up the colder. It is like there is an invisible fluid that comes from the hotter to the colder body, exactly (it is a similitude, that helps scientist in many applications, even in advanced physics field) like when there are two tanks of water connected with a pipe at different altitudes the water flows from the top to the bottom.

Energy is anything that becomes heat at low temperature (again it is not evident maybe, it requires basic knowledge of principles of thermodynamics. But that’s it). 

Energy is one of the biggest expenditure for families, for cities, for countries. Energy is one of the biggest market in the world. As an example, in order to sell energy, nations, agglomerate of nations, multinational companies  have built ducts across continents, across Mediterranean Sea. Energy is money, it is opportunity. Energy sometimes is war. From a statistical point of view, energy is richness. The higher the consumption of energy per person, the higher the richness of a nation. 

Thus, forget about the reduction of energy consumption worldwide. It is just not compatible to the existing situation and to what we would like to happen to non developed countries. If we want to improve lifestyle in Africa, Asia or Latin America, energy consumption will grow (consistently) in the next decades.  

In the last decades, the energy sector has faced massive changes. From big conventional thermal plant (nuclear included), to smaller power plants able to exploit local renewable resources. With some exceptions, like the big nuclear power plant in the UK (£ 18 Milliards) announced few days ago. In few years the penetration of the renewables into national grids has massively increased. Renewables, mostly PV and wind turbine, nowadays can be a competitive solution to the electricity from conventional generation. In Europe, and even more in the US, people are used to cheap energy and very reliable grid. But in the rest of the world, e.g. Africa South-East Asia, cost of electricity is much higher than in Europe. Difficulties in logistics (remote areas or islands), lack of infrastructures, commodity risk, diesel based generation are all items that negatively affect electricity price. In most of African countries, electricity is very expensive.  

In this context, the potential of the renewable may increase more and more. They can be an effective solution to the access to the electricity for millions of people. And we know that access to electricity means better lifestyle. 

Nevertheless, European countries like Italy know very well the problems caused by to high penetration of renewable. To be precise, it is not a problem caused by all the renewables. Hydro power plants do not stress the grid, rather they improve the flexibility level of big grids. PV and wind, with their intrinsic intermittent and non programmable nature, stress the management of national grid.  

This creates a big point of question mark on the future. Taking as granted that a purely green grid is not feasible for small grids, even more for national grids, how is possible to attenuate fluctuations of renewable energy, stabilize the grid and at the same time exploit the advantage of the RES (especially in remote areas of non developed countries)?

The (possible) solution is a new paradigm. It is necessary to reconsider the entire chain. A reliable electrical grid of thousands and thousands of kilometers would be a not sustainable investment in most of African countries, where the government is often unstable and without economic resources. Not only the generation plants shall be distributed, the users and the generators (PV field and/or wind turbine and/or diesel genset) must be connected through a micro grid where a high RES penetration is possible only if an energy storage system is included. Energy storage gives flexibility to the grid now able to house much more renewable energy than “rigid” grid.

Local micro grid with an hybridized generation capacity made of RES, diesel and energy storage, is a new paradigm possible thanks to the development of energy storage solutions. Electricity is the most important energy vector for humans, but it is always been characterize by a big limitation. It cannot be stored. Now there are a lot solutions (to be tested) that possibly can upon new structures of the energy chain, new business models. 

This is what somebody called the new industrial revolution, and energy storage is the key.