By Nicolás Rivero and Emily Wright, Washington Post
SAPPORO, Japan — Ocean winds whip across the beaches, hillsides and sprawling plains of Hokkaido. There’s enough wind energy here for Japan’s northernmost island to power itself and export clean electricity to the rest of the country.
But Hokkaido can’t harness all of that power unless it has a way to store energy when breezes are blowing and use it later when the gusts die down.
So, the island is turning to a new generation of batteries designed to stockpile massive amounts of energy— a critical step toward replacing power plants fueled by coal, gas and oil, which create a third of global greenhouse gas emissions.
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