The world is rapidly running out of fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are being burnt every day to power the world and this is adding to the carbon content of the atmosphere. Producing energy through fossil fuels is in no way sustainable. Hence, engineers and energy experts have been brainstorming in developing green energy solutions.

The energy is needed to be inspected from two angles. The first one being the production of the energy, and the second one being the storage of the energy. The latter becomes even more crucial when a country’s energy demands are being met by renewable energy sources. There could be days that the Sun doesn’t shine, or the wind doesn’t blow, giving way to energy deficiency. This energy deficiency can then be covered up using stored energy.

Highview Power from the UK has come up with a brilliant new environment-friendly method of storing energy. The underlying concept is that air could be compressed and stored as a liquid. When required, liquid air could be gasified again and used to run a turbine, which would then generate electricity.

Engineers believe that this is the best time to develop such a battery. Since most of the country is in lockdown and there are fewer energy demands across the country, the energy could be used to compress the air meanwhile. Even the energy that would be consumed in compressing the air would be from renewable sources.

This ‘air battery’ is capable of powering 200,000 homes for almost five hours. There are a few other chemical batteries that are circulating the market, however, neither are they this powerful nor could they hold a charge for this long. This new ‘green’ battery can hold the charge for weeks.

The real challenge that this liquid battery faces is not from other batteries, but the fossil fuel-run power plants itself. considering the lower running costs and higher energy productions, people don’t really want to shift from these traditional methods of producing energy.

Britain brought the first industrial revolution, now the UK plans on bringing a green industrial revolution. Liquid air battery can store up to 250MWh of energy. And this is almost double than that of Tesla’s most powerful chemical battery. The government plans on putting these pandemic lockdown days to good use. Building these batteries would create nearly 200 jobs.

Each battery is expected to last 30-40 years, which means that the next generation would also be getting to see this engineering marvel piece.