Renewable energies are good… but those on which we seem to rely the most to promote the ecological transition, solar and wind, have a rather annoying common flaw: they are intermittent. Without wind, wind turbines are just immobile giants. In the middle of the night or under a beautiful cloudy layer, the solar panels spread out in fields of useless black plates. Storing this energy when it is produced to restore it when it is no longer is therefore a major challenge for renewables.
In the case of a domestic installation, a battery-based solution is often proposed, but at the scale of power stations, this could become problematic. To produce enough batteries, large quantities of metals and rare earths would be needed, which would be expensive and not very environmentally friendly. Not to mention that batteries lose energy by discharging over long periods of time, and they eventually wear out.
The solution to this flaw in renewables could be found in installations which have ended their life: mines, including coal mines. But do not panic, it is not a question of using fossil resources emitting greenhouse gases, but rather of transforming them.
Sand going up and down
In terms of good ideas linked to the energy transition, at IIASA, an international research institute based near Vienna (Austria), a group
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