Fatwa Abdi. (Photo by Erwida Maulia)
Berlin. A young Indonesian scientist in Germany is working on a new technology that might in the near future allow the storage of solar power in the form of transportable fuel, at an affordable price.
Fatwa Abdi, a 32-year-old working for Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin for Materials and Energy, a German government-funded research agency, believes that solar power holds the largest potential for a primary renewable energy source in the future — and could be the key to solving Indonesia’s energy problems.
Solar power is in abundance – the surface of the earth receives 120,000 terawatts of solar radiation – and is indisputably environmentally friendly.
He notes, however, that there is one major problem with it.
“The problem is, it is intermittent. Sunlight is not always available – sometimes it’s there, sometimes it’s not. We’re talking about times [of the day], weather and geographical conditions,” Fatwa said in an interview in Berlin last week.
“But by storing it in [the form of] a chemical fuel, we can actually extend the availability. So what we’re trying to tackle in our institute is how to store this energy in the form of a chemical fuel,” he adds, citing gasoline as an example of widely-used chemical fuels.
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