More than 90 percent of the world's energy consumption today is heat: for power generation, heating and cooling of buildings, vehicles, steel and cement, and other industrial activities. These processes together emit an extraordinary amount of greenhouse gases into the environment every year.
The discovery of a way to transport, store, convert and use thermal energy would make it possible to avoid a global rise in temperature of more than 2 degrees Celsius - a critical increase that is expected to turn the planet into a cascade of catastrophic climate scenarios.
But, according to scientists on thermal energy from MIT in their letter published on August 10 of this year. in Nature Energy, “While this critical need exists, there is also a large gap between current research in the thermal sciences and what is needed for global decarbonization.
In an effort to motivate the scientific community to work on critical climate thematic issues, the authors have laid out five “grand challenges” in thermal energy and broad areas where significant innovations need to be made to stem the rise in global warming. This grand vision was shared by research author Professor Asegun Henry at MIT News.
Development of thermal storage systems for power grids, electric vehicles and buildings. Already, systems for storing excess electricity from renewable energy sources are being created in many countries, so that later they can be used for imbalances arising in existing power grids.
Electricity from renewable energy sources can reduce generation from coal and gas-fired power plants and reduce carbon dioxide emissions from electricity production by 25 percent. And the beauty of this direction is that in parallel with the decarbonization of the power grid, a sector is opening up for the use of environmentally friendly transport - an electric vehicle. Overall, then, we can talk about a 40 percent reduction in global carbon emissions.
Decarbonisation of industrial processes contributing to 15 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. The most important players here are cement, steel, aluminum and hydrogen. Some of these industrial processes are essentially carbon dioxide emissions, as the reaction itself must release carbon dioxide in order for it to work in its current form.
The question is, is there another way? Either a different way of making cement is needed, or you need to come up with something different. This is a very difficult challenge, but there are already good ideas, and it is necessary to use the entire scientific potential to find original solutions.
Solving the problem of cooling. Air conditioners and refrigerators contain chemicals that are very harmful to the environment, 2000 times more harmful than carbon dioxide on a molar basis. If the seal deteriorates, refrigerant will escape, then even a small amount of leakage will cause a significant displacement of global warming.
If you take India and other developing countries, which are now gaining more access to the electrical infrastructure of AC systems, leakage of these refrigerants (and they will certainly be) will cause 15-20 percent of global warming by 2050.
Long distance heat transfer. Electricity is being transmitted through the existing power grids, as AC transport is low-loss and cheap. The question is, is it possible to transfer heat the way electricity is transferred? There is a large amount of waste heat in power plants and the problem is that power plants are located away from residential areas.
This heat is transported with great losses. According to experts, the use of waste heat can satisfy all handling heating in the world. Unfortunately, today there are no technical solutions for the creation of heat pipelines without heat loss. And the question is, can someone create it?
These are cells for building variable conductivity. There are some demo designs that show that it is physically possible to create a thermal material or device that changes its conductivity.
This is a kind of switch, when the material is hot, it can block the heat of penetration through the wall, if it is cooled, its conductivity changes, the material passes or removes heat. It is still far from the functioning of such a system, but the foundation is already there.
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