The relentless advance of global climate change is requiring all countries to either restructure their existing energy systems, or find new ways of building and expanding them. Ongoing reliance on fossil fuels has been demonstrated to be unsustainable, especially if we are to avoid global temperatures to rise by more than 2 degrees. Renewable energies have developed and matured to a point where not only has grid parity been reached, but also where individual countries have already managed to run on renewables alone for several consecutive days (e.g., Portugal in 2016). However, the intermittency of renewables is the single greatest impediment to meeting demand continuously, and thus to increasing their shares in national electricity systems in order to reduce the dependence on, and burning of, fossil fuels and stave off climate change. Energy that is not needed at the precise moment of generation needs to be stored, for use later when there is increasing demand with respect to generation.
Renewable Energy - Storage brings together a systematic collection of research articles addressing the key challenges of storing energy - electricity, heat, or energy for transport. Research and review papers, and selected conference papers addressing many of the important ways to store energy are considered, including chemical, electrical, thermal, and mechanical technologies. This collection is meant to provide researchers and advanced students with an orientation of the field, to point them to relevant workgroups, and to address current challenges. The collection will grow over time as new research is published, and the research community engages with it. There will be synergies with other collections within the Renewable Energy Super Collection .