BERLIN (AP) — Amid the hum and heat of Berlin’s Reuter thermal power station stands a shining contraption that looks out of place in the decades-old machine hall.
Its silver pipes and vats contain a substance that Vattenfall, the plant’s operator, says could become a key ingredient for a fossil fuel-free future.
The energy company, together with a Swedish start-up, is testing the use of salt — though not quite the common table variety — to store heat, which accounts for more than half the power consumed in Germany.
If it works well, the system could help solve a problem posed by renewable energy sources like wind and solar the world over: they are unreliable, meaning they sometimes generate too much, and sometimes too little power.
“Germany currently has enough installed renewable energy capacity to produce twice as much as it needs, it’s just not constant,” says Hendrik Roeglin, who oversees the salt storage project for Vattenfall. Rival utility E.ON recently calculated that solar and wind power generated up to 52 gigawatt hours of electricity during peak daylight hours on Easter Monday. Germany’s energy consumption at the time was just 49.5 gigawatt hours.
“With many facilities like this one, in theory you wouldn’t need gas or other fossil fuel backups,” said Roeglin.
Phasing out nuclear, coal and gas is an ambitious undertaking for a heavily industrialized country such as Germany. The government has set a deadline to shutter all the country’s nuclear plants by 2022 and stop burning coal for electricity by 2038; gas will be a stop-gap technology until a way is found to rely wholly on renewable technology sometime around the middle of the century.
The plan, known as the Energiewende, or energy transition, is being closely watched by other countries trying to figure out how to curb greenhouse gas emissions and meet the Paris climate accord that aims to keep global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit).
Experts agree that a range of technological solutions will be necessary to replace fossil fuels, some already existing and some still at the experimental phase. California-based automaker Tesla has already shown in Australia that it can provide large lithium-ion battery systems to stabilize electricity grids.
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