System Stores Wind and Solar Power in the Form of Natural Gas, to Fit Neatly Into Existing Infrastructure
It's abundantly clear that we need to get off fossil fuels for various reasons (try Googling "oil spill"), but our infrastructures are far better tuned for the hydrocarbon fuels of the past century than the renewables of the next. So why don't we just make fuels that work in our existing technology from renewable energy? A German-Austrian research collaboration has engineered a means to turn electricity from wind a solar resources into carbon-neutral natural gas that can be stored and deployed within existing natural gas infrastructure. The process hopes to create the storage capacity for renewable power sources that they so sorely lack. When the wind is blowing and the sun is shining, excess power is siphoned off and used to split water through electrolysis. But rather than storing the hydrogen gas for use in fuel cells -- technology that, while potentially game-changing, is not widely employed -- a simple chemical...