Central Sardinia shouldn’t be usually thought of a hotbed of innovation: Arid and rural, a few of its street indicators riddled with bullet holes made by target-practicing locals, the setting recollects a Clint Eastwood western. But in Ottana, on the brownfield website of a former petrochemical plant, a brand new know-how is taking form which may assist the world gradual local weather change. The important thing part of this know-how is as unlikely because the distant location: carbon dioxide, the chief trigger of world warming.

Power Dome, a start-up based mostly in Milan, runs an energy-storage demonstration plant that helps to handle a mismatch within the native electrical energy market. “In Sardinia in the course of the day, everybody goes to the ocean,” Claudio Spadacini, chief government of Power Dome, mentioned. “They don’t use electrical energy, however there’s lots of provide,” he added, referring to the Italian island’s plentiful daylight.

Power Dome makes use of carbon dioxide held in an enormous balloon, the “dome” within the firm’s identify, as a sort of battery. In the course of the day, electrical energy from the native grid, some produced by close by fields of photo voltaic cells, is used to compress the carbon dioxide into liquid. At evening, the liquid carbon dioxide is expanded again into fuel, which drives a turbine and produces electrical energy that’s despatched again to the grid.

Photo voltaic and wind energy are fast-growing renewable sources, however they depend on nature’s intermittent schedule to supply electrical energy. Many researchers and policymakers say that storing such vitality till wanted, for hours and even days, is vital to transitioning economies away from fossil fuels. “Advancing energy-storage applied sciences is vital to reaching a decarbonized energy grid,” Jennifer M. Granholm, the U.S. vitality secretary, mentioned in a 2022 assertion, when her division introduced that it will commit greater than $300 million for long-duration vitality storage.

Corporations are growing and advertising various and artistic methods to retailer renewable vitality: liquefying carbon dioxide, de-rusting iron, heating towers stuffed with sand to temperatures virtually sizzling sufficient to soften aluminum. However predicting our energy-storage wants sooner or later, after an enormous vitality transformation, is a frightening prospect, and which of those approaches, if any, will show efficient and worthwhile is unclear.

“There’s a actual urgency round decarbonizing electrical energy on a timeline that’s a lot quicker than we’ve contemplated prior to now,” mentioned Elaine Hart, founding principal with Second Power Insights LLC, a clean-energy consultancy. “We don’t want applied sciences like long-duration vitality storage or hydrogen right this moment, however we’d want them on a big scale within the subsequent 15 to twenty years, so we’re in a vital time for his or her improvement.”