Energy Storage Opportunities are Everywhere

Hi everybody,

Thank you for your interest and all your comments on my previous articles.

So here is part 4 of my insights into the Future of Energy from an interview for TheEnergyBlog.

I’m looking forward to your comments and ideas.

All the best,

Michael

“I like to think of storage in the widest sense,” says Dr. Weinhold. “It’s not only about storing electricity for later use. It’s also about crossing over into other infrastructures like mobility. For example, we see it now in electic and hybrid cars that carry batteries. (As an aside, at Dr. Weinholds university institute they converted a Trabant into an E-Trabi as far back as the 1980’s. “We called it our ‘E-Trabant.’ It went very fast but it did not go very far,” recalled Dr. Weinhold, with a laugh.)

He continued: “We also see interesting storage possibilities in the heating sector via heat pumps. Consider that, in Germany, a third of the end-usage application of all energy consumed is for room heating. And the total amount of energy used for heating across homes and industry combined is probably around 50%. Imagine the potential of buffering the surplus of just a small proportion of that… and then redistributing it in the most effective manner possible via grids. The efficiencies would be considerable.

Then there is the field of hydrogen, via electrolyzers. Once you’ve created hydrogen you can easily store it and then use it as and when required. Hydrogen is the bridge to a huge amount of applications, for example there are car manufacturers who have announced the launch of Hydrogen fuel cell cars next year. And Hydrogen has many other impressive applications too. Next year, for example, we will install a 6 Megawatt, electrolyzer in the city of Mainz, which will provide control energy for the electricity market.

“In terms of what is state of the art, there are now large new battery storage systems based on Lithium Ion batteries that can be used to buffer power supply. And storage technologies can only continue to develop and improve in ways that we have not yet imagined,” said Dr. Weinhold.

Photo Credit: Energy Storage Future/shutterstock

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Michael Weinhold

Born in Rüsselsheim, Germany, Mr. Weinhold completed his studies at the Ruhr-University Bochum in 1993 with a Dr. Ing. degree in Electrical Engineering. He began his professional career that same year at Siemens PowerTransmission and Distribution (PTD). After holding several management-level positions in the Network Planning Department, he joined the High Voltage Division as technical ...

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