Hydrogen energy, economy and storage: Review and recommendation

Blockchains or distributed ledgers are an emerging technology that has drawn considerable interest from energy supply firms, startups, technology developers, financial institutions, national governments and the academic community. Numerous sources coming from these backgrounds identify blockchains as having the potential to bring significant benefits and innovation. Blockchains promise transparent, tamper-proof and secure systems that can enable novel business solutions, especially when combined with smart contracts. This work provides a comprehensive overview of fundamental principles that underpin blockchain technologies, such as system architectures and distributed consensus algorithms. Next, we focus on blockchain solutions for the energy industry and inform the state-of-the-art by thoroughly reviewing the literature and current business cases. To our knowledge, this is one of the first academic, peer-reviewed works to provide a systematic review of blockchain activities and initiatives in the energy sector. Our study reviews 140 blockchain research projects and startups from which we construct a map of the potential and relevance of blockchains for energy applications. These initiatives were systematically classified into different groups according to the field of activity, implementation platform and consensus strategy used. 1 Opportunities, potential challenges and limitations for a number of use cases are discussed, ranging from emerging peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading and Internet of Things (IoT) applications, to decentralised marketplaces, electric vehicle charging and e-mobility. For each of these use cases, our contribution is twofold: first, in identifying the technical challenges that blockchain technology can solve for that application as well as its potential drawbacks, and second in briefly presenting the research and industrial projects and startups that are currently applying blockchain technology to that area. The paper ends with a discussion of challenges and market barriers the technology needs to overcome to get past the hype phase, prove its commercial viability and finally be adopted in the mainstream.

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Blockchain technology in the energy sector: A systematic review of challenges and opportunities

Lithium-ion batteries play an important role in the life quality of modern society as the dominant technology for use in portable electronic devices such as mobile phones, tablets and laptops. Beyond this application lithium-ion batteries are the preferred option for the emerging electric vehicle sector, while still underexploited in power supply systems, especially in combination with photovoltaics and wind power. As a technological component, lithium-ion batteries present huge global potential towards energy sustainability and substantial reductions in carbon emissions. A detailed review is presented herein on the state of the art and future perspectives of Li-ion batteries with emphasis on this potential.

The lithium-ion battery: State of the art and future perspectives

Energy storage technologies, including storage types, categorizations and comparisons, are critically reviewed. Most energy storage technologies are considered, including electrochemical and battery energy storage, thermal energy storage, thermochemical energy storage, flywheel energy storage, compressed air energy storage, pumped energy storage, magnetic energy storage, chemical and hydrogen energy storage. Recent research on new energy storage types as well as important advances and developments in energy storage, are also included throughout.

A review of energy storage types, applications and recent developments

Electrical energy storage is expected to be important for decarbonizing personal transport and enabling highly renewable electricity systems. This study analyses data on 11 storage technologies, constructing experience curves to project future prices, and explores feasibl…

The future cost of electrical energy storage based on experience rates

Overview of current development in electrical energy storage technologies and the application potential in power system operation

Overview of current development in compressed air energy storage technology

This paper presents a new hybrid wind turbine system that is formed by a continuously variable transmission connection of the turbine drive shaft with an air expander/compressor. A mechanical power split device is designed to synthesize the power delivered by the wind turbine and the air expander/compressor. A small-scale hybrid wind turbine system is mathematically modeled, analyzed, and validated using a laboratory-scale experimental test rig. By utilizing compressed air energy storage, it is shown that the hybrid wind turbine system can provide smooth power output under fluctuating wind speed conditions. Such a direct connection structure reduces the overall system cost by using one generator instead of two compared with the conventional CAES system structure. The study demonstrates the benefit of improved efficiency and flexibility brought to the turbine operation by the hybridization of wind energy and stored energy.

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Modeling and Experimental Study of a Wind Turbine System in Hybrid Connection With Compressed Air Energy Storage

The concept of resilience has become increasingly important to our understanding of contemporary planning policy and practice. Resilience offers a new and increasingly relevant set of ideas, tools and approaches to help understand the complexities of an increasingly urbanised world and in the provision of safety and security of communities against an array of perceived hazards and threats. In this paper we reflect upon the emergence and usage of resilience thinking in urban planning, highlighting how traditional planning practices might be seen as maladaptive in response to risk and create impediments to the actual use of resilience principles by planners. To conclude this paper we illuminate the urgent requirement to better connect theories of resilience to their actual practice in order to close the implementation gap in urban resilience praxis.

On securing the generational challenge of urban resilience

The discourse of resilience has increasingly been utilised to advance the political prioritisation of enhanced security and to extend the performance of risk management in the Anthropocene. This has been notably advanced through integrated approaches that engage with uncertainty, complexity and volatility in order to survive and thrive in the future. Within this context, and drawing on findings from a number of EU-wide research projects tasked with operationalising critical infrastructure resilience, this paper provides a much-needed assessment of how resilience ideas are shaping how critical infrastructure providers and operators deal with complex risks to ‘lifeline’ systems and networks, whilst also illuminating the tensions elicited in the paradigm shift from protective-based risk management towards adaptive-based resilience. In doing so, we also draw attention to the implications of this transition for organisational governance and for the political ecologies of the Anthropocene that calls for...

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Jonathan Clarke

Papers

Overview of current development in electrical energy storage technologies and the application potential in power system operation

Overview of current development in compressed air energy storage technology

Modeling and Experimental Study of a Wind Turbine System in Hybrid Connection With Compressed Air Energy Storage

On securing the generational challenge of urban resilience

Critical infrastructure lifelines and the politics of anthropocentric resilience