To : Barack Obama, President of America

Date : 8th November, 2014

Subject: Storage of Solar Energy

Dear Mr. President,

Energy is a very essential part of our lives. If we think of a normal day, for anything
and everything we need some form of energy like from making morning coffee to
taking a hot shower to getting to work to doing work in our laptops and to
everything. In 2012, the average annual electricity consumption for a U.S.
residential utility customer was 10,837 kWh, an average of 903 kilowatt hours
(kWh) per month. This clearly proves that we need a lot of energy to function.
People know the necessity of energy in their lives which is why a lot of work is going
on to find alternative energy sources which have no harm to the environment.
Photovoltaic cells, Wind mills, Biofuels all these have been very popular. Everyone is
very concerned about the production of energy but they are forgetting that storage
of energy is also a very important part. If we are able to produce energy then we
have energy for some time but if we dont have somewhere or something we can
store in this energy producing energy would not make sense as it would be of no
use. For example for a person living near the poles, they have sunlight during the
summer by means of which they can produce energy during the day but if he has
nowhere to store the energy produced, he would freeze to death at night. In the
short run storage of energy might not be a big issue but it definitely is a big problem
in the long run. Every next day we are running out of fossil fuels and coal. Every
next day we are doing more carbon emissions and are causing global warming. The
only way to not let this be would be to find some way to store green energy. So,
solar energy has to be stored.
Energy can be stored in many ways but the most popular way is batteries. Batteries
store electricity as chemical energy. Lead acid battery is the most common energy
storage device in use at present. Its success is due to its maturity relatively low
cost, long lifespan, fast response, and low self-discharge rate. It is made up
chemical solution that contain 35% sulphuric acid and 65% water, the solution is
known as electrolyte which cause the chemical reaction that produce the electron,
when it is charge it stored energy and converted the energy to produce current for
use. The advantages of the batteries is that it can be used for both shortterm and
longterm applications. Their lives span is in the range of 10 to 15 years, this is
shorter than those of PHS and CAES. For largescale storage batteries usually cost
more. Therefore when we think about energy production in a larger scale, storage of
energy is an issue. We cannot use batteries to store hundreds of killowatts of power
and also batteries take a lot of space and cost a lot of money.
Also, there are cases when the production of energy exceeds the storage capacity
so energy has to be wasted. California already produces more solar energy than it
can consume during certain hours in the spring, when its sunny but still too cool for

air conditioners. Excess generation may reach 10,000 to 15,000 megawatts by

2020, when the state meets its renewable targets, so batteries will be needed to
avoid wasting energy. The cost of wasting energy is less than storing it in batteries.

Apart from that it is hard to get a dead battery to reuse thus we would have to
throw them. Batteries are made up of chemicals. When these chemicals
decompose, it creates chemical hazards. So, when we think this way our old way of
getting energy form coal seems reasonable and also because it is easy to transport
energy that way. We cannot use coal or use more batteries rather we have to find a
way to produce green energy and store it without causing any more pollution.
One of the things that we could do would be replace our old batteries with
rechargeable batteries. Rechargeable batteries have higher efficiency. So, if we
have to use batteries then using these in place of using non rechargeable batteries
would reduce the number of dead batteries thus reducing the chemical pollution
that we might cause. Improving technology would be the next best thing to do.
Improving technology is cutting costs, which means storage systems could replace
some plants and avoid the need for new ones, as well as cut demand for oil. In the
next seven or eight years, the price of batteries used for storage may fall by about
half, to $230 a kilowatt hour of generating capacity, said Sofia Savvantidou, an
analyst at Citigroup in London.
Another option could be opportunity funding from the government. If the
government would fund scientist or institutions for research to find new options for
efficient storage of energy, may be in the future some inventions would be made
and the problem would be solved. If the government could provide good incentives
to capable firms or research labs it could actually be a very profitable deal for
everyone in the world. The one field where they could invest on could be improving
the efficiency of capacitors because they can store energy too.
A lot is going on in the solar energy production and storage in the world which we
see and read about every day. The question is Is it going to be enough? We cannot
give up on finding new ways and methods for the conservation of energy in one
form or other. Our future is dependent on the fact that we should be able to store
energy or else we will be either facing global warming or energy crisis which one or
another is a loss to us. Therefore, steps to efficient storage of energy should be our
major concern.