Addressing the Intermittency Challenge: Massive Energy Storage in a Sustainable Future [Scanning the Issue]

The 21st Century industrial civilization that surrounds us is profoundly dependent upon massive energy storage so familiar that even the authors of this Special Issue seldom notice it. Seemingly unrelated to mankind’s shrinking primary dowries of fissile or fertile nuclides and of fossil organic carbon, are the commonplace and unremarked piles powdered coal outside electric generating stations, the huge tanks of liquid hydrocarbons adjacent to our refineries, and the underground caverns storing natural gas near our cities. Energy, convenient in form and available upon demand, is taken for granted. In the best of scenarios, nuclear fission, even assuming that we solve the nuclear waste problem, does not appear to scale to meet global energy needs [2]. Once economical sources of fossil fuels approach depletion, we will have no certain recourse but renewables, primarily sun. But sun and wind and tide and wave are not available on demand because they are intermittent: