About the Author
Mark Howitt is Chief Technical Officer, a founding director of Storelectric. He leads Storelectric’s technical and operations, minimising technological risk, maximising efficiency and environmental friendliness, and speed to market. He focuses on technologically simple solutions using proven technologies wherever possible.
His degree was in Physics with Electronics. He has 12 years’ management and innovation consultancy experience world-wide. In a rail multinational, Mark developed 3 profitable and successful businesses: in commercialising a non-destructive technology he had innovated, in logistics and in equipment overhaul. In electronics manufacturing, he developed and introduced to the markets 5 product ranges and helped 2 businesses grow strategically.
Doing My Bit
I was recently asked: do renewable power plants impact the environment? Quite obviously the questioner was seeking to justify pursuing the fossil-fuelled status quo by nit-picking faults in the case for clean energy. This led me to reflect on some environmental...
Alternatives to CAES
Alternatives to CAES for provision of arbitrage, balancing, ancillary, stability and other services come from power stations, pumped hydro-electric stations, batteries, Demand Side Response (DSR), interconnectors and ignorance. Power Stations Power stations are being...
The Future Role of Hydrogen
Hydrogen will play a significant role in zero-carbon economies in the future. It can be stored at large scale, especially in salt caverns which can be formed in much of the world; It can be stored at ultra-high pressure – vehicle makers are considering up to 700bar:...
Synergies with Renewables and Interconnectors
Storelectric’s CAES plants are usually designed as stand-alone plants with stand-alone profits based on buying electricity from the grid and selling it back to the grid. There are many up-side revenue streams available, such as buying and selling under PPAs (Private...
Adiabatic v Isothermal CAES
Grid-scale electricity storage using an innovative form of Compressed Air Energy Storage When discussing adiabatic CAES, such as that proposed by Storelectric, it is frequently confused with isothermal CAES such as that proposed by Lightsail, SustainX and General...
A 21st Century Electricity System
Introduction The current regulatory and contractual framework is designed around a 20th century industry (baseload coal and nuclear, dispatchable gas, all other bits are add-ons). The cost of electricity is diverging increasingly from its price: already around half of...
De-Bunking Fictions Citing Germany
There have been a number of reports claiming that the German experience proves that what’s needed on the system is not baseload (described as “poison”) or storage, but lots of flexibility. A rational analysis of these articles finds numerous contradictions and errors....
The Scale of Need for Storage
The Energy Transition The energy transition to a zero-carbon economy is, quite correctly, seeing widespread roll-out of tens of GW of renewable generation. we're already at over 30GW and, because of load factors, to supply our 56GW peak demand will need over 200GW...
CAES or Batteries?
CAES or Batteries? Many people have suggested that batteries are a viable way forward for grid-scale electricity storage, and some have cast doubt on whether there is a role for Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES). However CAES, batteries and the other storage...