Germany switched on Europe’s largest commercial battery plant on Tuesday, an installation powered by 25,600 lithium-ion batteries that will help stabilize the region’s growing supply of energy from renewable sources.
The 6 million euro (US$7.8 million) plant, the size of a school gymnasium, is designed to help even out short-term fluctuations that sometimes accompany power from renewable sources as Germany continues to raise its share of renewable energy from about 25 percent currently to between 40 percent and 45 percent by 2025 and 55 percent and 60 percent by 2035.
“This is an interesting alternative to conventional power plants and the regional utilities have come up with an interesting project here,” German Minister for Economic Affairs Sigmar Gabriel told German TV at the plant’s opening in Schwerin.
So far the lack of extensive storage capacity has been one of the biggest hurdles to Germany’s expansion into renewable energy sources as power produced by wind and photovoltaic can generally not be easily stored in any sizable quantities.
With a storage capacity of 5MWh, Schwerin’s battery fills that gap.
The plant, next to a power substation operated by local utility, Wemag AG, is to address short-term fluctuations that can cause damage and lead to power outages.
The utilities’ grid covers an area of 8,600km2 in northeastern Germany, which received 80 percent of its energy from wind power last year. That figure is expected to rise to 100 percent this year.
Germany’s Energiewende, or switch to renewable energy sources away from nuclear and fossil fuels, is the centerpiece of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s energy and environment policy.
Since 2000, when green energy incentives were introduced by a coalition of Social Democrats and Greens, the country’s renewables sector has boomed.
Merkel made the policy her own after the 2011 meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima reactor by speeding up a nuclear phaseout. However, she has drawn criticism for shielding industry from bearing more of the cost of the subsidies for green energy sources, which have pushed up retail power prices.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day