Researchers around the globe are trying hard to find alternative solutions to meet our ever rising power needs. Since fossil fuels, as we all know would deplete very soon, given the usage in today’s time.
A lot of research has been going on in the field of renewable energy for over a century.
An American coal utility has come up with an idea of storing power produced by wind energy in the form of high technology batteries, to enable more wind power t its grid.
As the famous proverb goes, necessity is the mother of invention and that’s exactly what American Electric Power (AEP) is doing. Although the technology is very expensive and to use it at such big a scale has never been done, but the company is hopeful that it will be able to save the energy available today for a better tomorrow.
AEP is ready to heavily invest into the venture if the carbon controls were revised and wind power was given financial help over coal.
Being built by a Japanese company, the batteries, temporarily fixed, could be moved as per usage, to another site. Each equivalent to the size of a double decker bus would be able to store as much energy as produced by a single large wind machine in a day; 1 Megawatt of power, enough to meet the power needs of a medium sized shopping center for seven hours.
The cost of the entire set right now is as high as $ 27 million for six megawatts of power, building a gas turbine would be cheap enough.
Aiming to save at least 25 megawatts of power from these batteries over the next decade, the company calls it a complete game changer if they are able to get cheap storage.
The batteries would charge at night when the wind is high and the prices of electricity are low only to be used during the day when the prices are many times high and wind is low, thereby making it further effective.
Experts believe that with wind energy there is substantial growth options available in the wind energy sector before the need to storing comes into question. Contrary to what the critics feel AEP is hopeful about the project.
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