Energy accumulation

There is sufficient energy around us, but it may not always be available in a useful state or at the moment when we need it. For example, the sun does not shine at night, but people still need light. Therefore, we want to “store” energy for later use.

New technologies and methods of managing the charging and discharging of batteries enable us to collect and store energy from various sources and release it in such a manner that we achieve the lowest possible energy loss and increase the beneficial effects and efficiency of the entire system.
For example, the use of energy from photovoltaic systems has proven to be problematic in recent years. A large generation capacity of solar power plants was installed and the distribution grid was not able to deal with fluctuations cause by intense sunlight, which in turn caused instability. It is therefore necessary to connect all processes of generating electricity from renewable sources and make it possible to use accumulated surplus energy at a later time.

The subject of the university team research is a device for storing electricity and, conversely, using at another time. This is a necessary part of the project, which is focused on obtaining energy from renewable and non-traditional sources, because energy thus acquired is not always available when people need it. Therefore, they developed a new transformer for the energy-accumulation system. In practice, it functions as a sort of bank in which energy can be deposited in the case of surplus production and then withdrawn in the event of an outage or sudden increase in consumption.

An advantage of this system is that it is not intended only for cities and villages, but can also be used as a backup energy source for industrial enterprises and as a source of energy in developing countries or in outlying and inaccessible areas where alternative sources, such as wind and solar, are used for generating energy.

Alternative sources of energy, such as water, sunlight and wind, among others, have enormous potential. However, production of energy from these sources causes instability in the distribution grid. Therefore, our objective is to connect all processes of generating energy from renewable sources and to store surplus energy for later use. They are working to ensure that we all will not notice any fluctuations.

ENET Centre, VŠB – Technical University of Ostrava in cooperation with Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.