Swords to ploughshares: Hyme re

Denmark's Hyme Energy wants to save decommissioned fossil-fuel heat and power plants by repurposing them as super-cheap renewable energy storage and release facilities, using cutting-edge molten salt technology borrowed from the advanced nuclear sector. Its first plant will be online by 2024.

There's no point throwing out the baby with the bathwater; yesterday's dirty power plants have plenty to offer tomorrow's clean energy grid. They've already got billions of dollars' worth of infrastructure in place, like well-established connections to the power grid, steam turbines, transformers and the like, and the right clean energy projects can make the most of what's left behind.

Earlier this year, we wrote about MIT spinout Quaise, and its plans to re-power old coal- and gas-fired plants with ultra-deep geothermal energy. But to get there, it's going to need to drill holes much deeper than anyone's ever managed, using bleeding-edge energy beam technology developed for heating up plasma in nuclear fusion experiments. That'll take time.

Hyme's plan is simpler. It'll concentrate on combined heat and power plants, replacing the heat from combustion with heat from hydroxide molten salt energy storage systems. These will charge up using excess energy from the grid, and discharge by sending heat out directly for domestic and industrial use, and also by driving steam turbines to put electricity back into the grid when renewable production is low.

最新评论