In September, an editorial entitled “UN Sustainable Development Goal 7: clean energy – a holistic approach towards a sustainable future through hydrogen storage” was published in the scientific journal RSC Sustainability. This article addresses perspectives and research under development at the AHI and the University of Lisbon.
The UN Sustainability Development Goal (UNSDG) No. 7 is: Ensure access to affordable and clean energy – for every one. Energy enables the development of agriculture, business, communications, education, healthcare and transportation and the lack of access to energy prevents economic and human development. Thus it is connected to the majority of the other UNSDGs.
The modern societies rely on renewable resources as alternative to fossil ones. To meet this goal, critical actions are needed: alternative energy storage solutions based on renewable resource with low CO2 emissions. There is no single answer to tackle this challenge, but it requires a portfolio of solutions well adapted to specific regional demands. Typical modern energy harvesting technologies (i. e. wind power, solar power, water power) have a single major obstacle and limitation in common: the available battery technologies in use are not suitable to store large amounts of electrical energy. This remaining bottleneck for the long-term consolidation of renewable energies in the electrical grid is the grid stability owing to the variation of the electricity production with the above mentioned technologies. To overcome this obstacle it requires energy storage systems with high capacities in the MWh range to prevent blackouts owing to over-/underproduction or over-/underconsumption of electricity since the electrical grid itself cannot store large amounts of electricity. Potential solutions for this problem and the role of hydrogen gas derived from water, and carbon dioxide derived from air for energy storage systems are addressed in this article. In addition the limitations of lithium batteries are described with the requirements for education and knowledge transfer (UNSDG 4) as the fundamental keys for sustainability.
The open access article can be accessed under the following DOI link: http://doi.org/10.1039/d3su90036c