Kind: captions
Language: en
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our attitude about energy hasn't changed
much in the past 50 years we want it
when we want it with absolutely no
delays the thing is because many of us
are on similar schedules our energy use
tends to follow a similar pattern for
example we use lots of it in the early
evening when we get home from work or
school and then very little a few hours
later when most of us are asleep the
result is that cities and towns have
times of high and low energy use
throughout the day so in order to make
sure that everyone has energy when they
want it utility companies have to keep
costly power plants on standby just to
fill in during peak times it would be
great if renewable energy sources were
always available during times of high
demand so we wouldn't need those extra
power plants
but solar and wind farms produce
electricity only when the sun is shining
or the wind is blowing and if they
produce more electricity than people use
too bad that electricity is gone forever
if we had efficient ways of holding on
to the excess electricity we produce we
could rely more on Renewables and save
money we can't store electricity
directly but we can store it as other
types of energy figuring out the best
way to do this is one of the biggest
challenges facing scientists and
Engineers today one of the most likely
Solutions is to store electricity in the
form of chemical energy inside Giant
batteries these batteries are similar to
those found inside a cell phone or
hybrid car but on an enormous scale the
hard part is making a battery that can
provide Power to thousands of people for
several hours but which isn't too costly
and doesn't take up too much space there
are many other ideas as as well some
involve storing electricity in the form
of potential energy or kinetic energy
but while all these ideas have promised
we still don't have reliable ways of
storing energy in every location it may
be up to the next generation of
scientists and Engineers to rethink how
we use and store the electricity we
produce
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