Energy Views

As with the environment, the summer of 2019 saw the future of the firm British Steel hang in the balance. Two buyers jossled for position, with both claiming that they could convert the assets to make "Green Steel". One was Liberty House, who wanted to shutdown at least one of Scunthorpe's two blast furnaces down, and replace it with an electric arc furnace. Unlike the existing technology, which burns coal to produce virgin steel, their chosen technology is ideal for melting down steel for recycling. The other was the pension fund of the Turkish military. According to an article in the FT (paywall), this buyer wants to convert at least half of Scunthorpe production to run on Natural Gas, rather than coal, and ultimately on hydrogen. But which would be greener? That's hard to say without running the detailed numbers, but let's look at the logic. Today, like many steel producers, the steel is produced through the consumption of vast amounts of a ...

By this I don't mean pumped hydro storage, where water is pumped into a raised reservoir, ready to be released through turbines, back into the lower reservoir. I mean energy stored in solid mass, which is raised when energy is cheap - much like the water in pumped hydro - and dropped to spin a generator during events of peak demand or network stress. Let's look at two recent grid-scale examples. First up is Energy Vault , based in Lugano, Switzerland. This project is entirely above ground, and uses a six-armed crane to lift and descend 30 ton weights. Here's their wonderful short video, which fans of Minecraft will especially enjoy: The funding for Energy Vault is certainly impressive: in summer 2019 they obtained $110m of investment from the mighty Softbank ,  their first energy storage investment. According to the FT (paywall), Softbank themselves will utilise one deployment, and Tata Power have also ordered another. The video shows the crane suppor...