How the humble chairlift could revolutionize renewable energy | Grist

What do you see when you imagine a zero-carbon future? Electric buses zipping by? Rolling hills covered with solar panels? Offshore wind farms towering over the sea? If batteries are part of your vision, good thinking. But there’s a promising, if whimsical, piece of the renewable energy puzzle that might be missing from your mental…

Is renewable energy’s future dammed?

Renewables struggle to match power supply to common patterns of demand. The result is a renewable energy bottleneck. If the U.S. is to meet global climate goals, an enormous, rapid shift away from fossil fuels is needed. This creates what one recent academic paper calls “green vs. green trade-offs,” exemplified in the West by the…

100% Renewable Alaska

Part 1 of Bjørn Olson’s terrifically interesting, extremely well-researched and exciting proposal by Kerry Williams to shift the future of much of interior Alaska’s power source to renewable energy, while dropping rate payer costs by nearly 60%. Source: 100% Renewable Alaska

New Solar + Battery Price Crushes Fossil Fuels, Buries Nuclear

“This is the lowest solar-photovoltaic price in the United States,” said James Barner, the agency’s manager for strategic initiatives, “and it is the largest and lowest-cost solar and high-capacity battery-storage project in the U.S. and we believe in the world today.” Source: New Solar + Battery Price Crushes Fossil Fuels, Buries Nuclear

The role of pumped-hydro storage in a 100% renewable world

If the demand for electricity in Juneau were to grow while the region grappled with a handful of low precipitation years, could the existence of a pumped-hydro storage system prevent facilities like Greens Creek, the Federal Building and others from having to burn thousands of gallons of diesel fuel for their energy needs? Add this…

Pumped Hydro Energy Storage Archives – News from Australia

Pumped storage is an essential solution for grid reliability, providing one of the few large-scale, affordable means of storing and deploying electricity. Pumped storage projects store and generate energy by moving water between two reservoirs at different elevations. Essentially, this low tech concept creates a simple land and water based battery. This info from Australia…

Stacking concrete blocks is a surprisingly efficient way to store energy

A startup called Energy Vault thinks it has a viable alternative to pumped-hydro: Instead of using water and dams, the startup uses concrete blocks and cranes. While everyone else is out looking for high-tech, futuristic battery innovation, there may be real value in thinking about how to apply low-tech solutions to 21st-century problems. Read Akshat Rathi’s…