Cooling the planet with coal : Time to count the carbon cost

Sweating through my third shirt of the day in India, I saw first-hand how the limitations of lithium-ion storage are scuppering efforts to transition to clean energy alternatives.

Part of the problem is the current focus of our industry, which revolves around ancillary service markets and a myopic approach to trading. This is something I’ve experienced as a trader in gas markets, fixated on those hour-by-hour buy-and-sell prices.

We know that renewables can help to push prices down in a more sustainable way long-term, and that less reliance on the whims of volatile global markets can only be a good thing. But globally we’re currently nowhere near the amount of storage capacity that we need to properly address energy demand at peak times and shift our consumption towards using a majority of renewable sources.

Read on for more insight.