Pumped Hydro – Informed Comment https://www.juancole.com Thoughts on the Middle East, History and Religion Sat, 29 Jul 2023 17:18:44 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.8.10 Renewable Energy poised to overtake Coal, Providing 1/3 of Global Electricity: IEA https://www.juancole.com/2023/07/renewable-providing-electricity.html Sat, 29 Jul 2023 05:15:33 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=213528 Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The International Energy Agency’s report on electricity markets is out and it has some good news.

Depending on how cold the winters are, the IEA expects renewable sources of energy to outstrip coal in 2024, and forever thereafter. It calls this change “structural.” That is, it isn’t a blip or something that could easily be reversed. We are entering a world where people will routinely get more electricity from wind, solar, water and battery than from dirty coal. While Asia is still somewhat wedded to coal and China is even still building new coal-fired power plants, this slight increase in use will be more than offset by the rapidly dwindling numbers of coal-fired plants in the US and Europe. So IEA expects coal use to decline over the next couple of years, and that renewables will go on growing from strength to strength.

China and India account for 80% of all planned coal plants, and as renewables fall in price and the true cost of coal in the form of global boiling becomes ever more apparent, both may scale back coal projects. In fact, India is considering halting all new coal plant planning except for those facilities already committed to. Right now, coal accounts for about a third of global power generation, but it is on a steep path to decline.

Global electricity demand growth is muted in 2023, but may take off again next year. IEA expects all extra electricity demand to be met by renewables this year and next.

And next year, for the very first time fully 33% of global power will be generated by renewables. And coal generation will fall below that benchmark, heading toward zero by 2050 (if we know what is good for us).

The world has made incredible progress on the renewables front in the past decade, as this IEA chart demonstrates:


IEA, Renewable electricity generation by technology, 2010-2025, IEA, Paris https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/renewable-electricity-generation-by-technology-2010-2025, IEA. Licence: CC BY 4.0.

Carbon dioxide pollution from burning coal and fossil gas are expected to fall this year and next. If this expectation is met, it could signal that our CO2 emissions are leveling off in preparation for declining. If you look at the period 2019-2024, the report says, fossil fuel use will have fallen in 4 out of the 6 years. The authors expect coal and gas will just go on declining from here on in, even in years when demand for electricity increases. The extra demand will be met by renewables.

There are some paradoxes in the current situation to which they attend.

Because of extensive use by Australians of roof-top solar along with utility-scale solar, the price of electricity fell below zero 20% of the time in 2022, compared to 1% of the time in the Netherlands and Germany. For the price to fall below zero means that there is not enough storage capacity to smooth out the ups and downs of production, and states need to up their megabattery game substantially.

Another problem is that global heating is causing people to run air conditioners more. But if they run their ACs off coal and fossil gas, they are putting more heat-trapping CO2 into the atmosphere, which will heat up the earth more, so that they’ll have to turn up the AC more, and on and on in a vicious cycle. Obviously, everybody should be running their AC off renewable electricity, and probably this ideal can only be attained with government investment. Still, individuals can pitch in. In most parts of the US, e.g., if a homeowner is going to be in their house for 10 years or more, they will save money by putting up rooftop solar panels. If they drive an EV and fuel it from the panels that will speed the pay-back time even more. The panels can pay for themselves in as little as 6 years.

Finally, global heating causes drought as well as faster evaporation from bodies of water, so one of the three biggest sources of renewable power, hydro, is actually in danger of declining. Globally, hydropower has dropped from 38% to 36% since 1990. Governments should plan on continued decreases in hydropower, ensuring that it is replaced by wind and solar, not by fossil fuels.

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Germany Plans to drive 10 million km of Train Traffic in one Province Electrically with New Charging Technology https://www.juancole.com/2022/11/province-electrically-technology.html Sat, 05 Nov 2022 04:02:39 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=207983 By Edgar Meza | –

( Clean Energy Wire ) – German railway company Deutsche Bahn (DB) has begun to electrify rail lines in the north of the country with an innovative new electrical infrastructure that will charge battery-powered trains and replace diesel locomotives.

DB is planning to build so-called “overhead contact line islands” in the state of Schleswig-Holstein, beginning with the first catenary masts in the city of Kiel and municipality of Büchen. The new infrastructrure is scheduled to be completed by the end of 2023. Instead of end-to-end electrification of every kilometre of track, the new technology only requires the electrification of short sections of track or individual stations. T

The battery trains use the overhead line, which only measures a few hundred metres to a few kilometres, to charge their batteries for journeys on non-electrified sections of track.

In the future, more than 10 million kilometres of train traffic in Schleswig-Holstein will be driven electrically rather than using fossil fuels, saving 10 million litres of diesel fuel per year. Initially, more than 30 additional catenary masts are required in the Kiel and Büchen stations.

By the end of 2023, DB will build the first overhead contact line islands and charging substations on the west coast of Schleswig-Holstein.

“With innovative infrastructure and state-of-the-art technology, we are continuing to push ahead with the expansion of alternative drives,” said Berthold Huber, DB’s head of infrastructure.

“Our goal is clear: Deutsche Bahn will be climate-neutral by 2040. We are also helped by creative solutions such as the overhead contact line island for battery-powered trains.”

Schleswig-Holstein economy minister Claus Ruhe Madsen added: “Thanks to battery-powered trains, most of the diesel multiple units in Schleswig-Holstein will soon be obsolete.” DB is set to expand its railway electrification efforts next year. The company has faced recent criticism for its slow progress in electrifying railway lines.

All texts created by the Clean Energy Wire are available under a “Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0)” .

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Death Knell for Big Carbon? Globally, All New Electricity Demand was Met by Renewables in first 1/2 of ’22, with Fossil Fuels Flat https://www.juancole.com/2022/11/globally-electricity-renewables.html Tue, 01 Nov 2022 05:34:06 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=207916 Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – In the first half of 2022, there was no increase in the world’s use of fossil fuels, and all new electricity demand was met by renewables. The world is nearing a tipping point, estimated by the International Energy Agency to come in 2025, after which all new electricity demand will be consistently met by renewables as fossil fuels steadily decline. So reports Malgorzata Wiatros-Motyka of the UK-based Ember think tank. Ember was founded to end the use of coal, the most carbon-intensive of the fossil fuels.

This finding is highly significant. When you ask fossil fuel producers whether they are doomed, they express confidence that their products will still be needed in the future because there will be tremendous growth in demand for electricity around the world, a demand that they do not believe renewables can meet. Ember is saying that reality is slapping down that argument, and that even now new demand is being taken care of by wind, solar and hydro.

In other words, we could look back on 2022 as a significant turning point in world history.

That global demand for fossil fuels is on the verge of peaking and then rapidly declining may be behind the mysterious behavior of the oil companies, which are selling their lucrative California assets and withdrawing from the state. They foresee having to close those oil rigs down, and don’t want to get stuck with the cost of environmental clean-up if they are still the proprietors when the industry goes under.

It is thus great good news that fossil fuel consumption for electricity generation did not increase during the first half of this year, but keeping the level the same is not enough. We need, Ember says, to cut fossil fuel use in half by 2030 if we are to keep the extra global heating from climate change to under 1.5°C [2.7° F.]

Because of the Ukraine War and consequent global energy crisis, it had been expected that we might see a return to fossil fuels this year. The Ember report, surveying 90 countries, found instead that while some countries such as Germany and India increased their coal consumption, the US cut its by 7% in the first half of this year, and China cut its by 3%. Totaling it all up, Ember found a decline in coal use for the entire globe during those six months.

Internationally, electricity demand grew 3% (389 terawatt hours) in January-June 2022 compared to the same period the previous year. New wind, solar and hydro grew by 416 terawatt hours, handily meeting this increase and more. Wind and solar alone met 77% of it around the world.

A pattern emerged, such that the two biggest national economies in the world, the United States and China, were the most successful in generating vast amounts of new electricity with wind and solar. In China, nearly all (92%) of new electricity demand was met by wind and solar alone. China’s green surge is so enormous that this one country alone accounted for 37% of all new wind power in the world, and 38% of all new solar.

In the U.S., these two green sources met 81% of new power demand. India, which now has the fifth largest GDP in the world, just after Germany, was only able to meet 29% of new electricity demand with wind and solar.

In Europe, as well, wind and solar forged ahead, with wind increasing by 14% and solar by 25%.

Despite a temporary turn to coal in Europe and India because of the Ukraine crisis, globally coal use dropped by 1%, with the U.S. and China shedding this fuel. Fossil gas use also declined very slightly. Some countries turned to petroleum for power generation — rare except in oil states such as Saudi Arabia — which kept fossil fuels at about the same level in the global energy mix as in the first half of 2021.

In the first half of this year, widespread resort to wind, solar, batteries and hydro saved the world $40 billion in fuel costs and avoided 450 megatons of carbon dioxide emissions. Without these green sources of electricity generation, fossil fuel use would have risen by 4%, with all the environmental and climate damage that increase would have implied.

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Gravity power holds major promise for the decarbonization of electricity grids: Wind and solar energy get a lift from falling-weight technology https://www.juancole.com/2022/08/decarbonization-electricity-technology.html Wed, 24 Aug 2022 04:29:58 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=206568 By David Henry | –

( Landscape News) – The Energy Vault Resiliency Center, a scalable gravity-powered energy storage center that holds major promise for supporting clean energy transitions. Business Wire 4 August 2022

The general workings of gravity are nothing new: What goes up must come down.

Over the past decade, scientists have been pursuing a new approach to this force of nature, exploring how it can generate carbon-free electricity through what’s been dubbed as “gravity power.”

Let’s take the fabled story of Isaac Newton’s falling apple as an example, but give it a twist. Instead of there being an apple dangling above him, Newton takes an apple and lifts it above his head, giving that apple his energy. That energy is then stored in the apple until he drops it, when the force of gravity releases the energy in the form of motion as it falls to the ground.

Gravity-powered batteries reconfigure this concept on a much larger scale. Steve Taber, chairman and chief executive officer of Gravity Power, describes it as a game-changing technology. “[It’s] capable of decarbonizing the grid by 80 to 90 percent without raising costs for consumers and without damaging the environment,” he says of his California-based company.

So, could this cornerstone of modern physics help accelerate the transition to a sustainable future and support nations’ goals of achieving carbon neutrality by 2050?

How it works

Gravity has been used to power mechanical movement since Dutchman Christiaan Huygens invented the pendulum clock in the 1600s.


Pumped Hydro Storage Plant, Thuringia, via Pixabay.

Modern-day gravity power involves raising a heavy object with a pump, crane or motor to create gravitational potential energy. When the same mass is lowered to its original height, it activates a generator that converts the kinetic energy into electricity. Using this principle, gravity power can now be generated from skyscraper elevators, decommissioned mineshafts, and the downhill momentum of electric trucks and trains, to name a few examples. The entire structures that support such operations are considered gravity batteries.

Modern gravity power projects use a similar logic as with hydropower dams. Dan Meyers, Unsplash

The concept is similar to hydroelectric power stations – the first of which was built in Switzerland in 1907 – which pump water uphill and release it downhill into generators when electricity is needed.

However, storing pumped hydro energy requires large amounts of land, needs to be located near a water source, is not scalable once built, and often uses carbon-intensive materials that are harmful to the environment, according to Robert Piconi, chairman and CEO of Energy Vault, a Swiss-U.S. company that was founded in 2017 and has become one of the sector’s leaders.

“Energy Vault’s gravity-based solutions are founded on the well-understood physics and mechanical engineering fundamentals of pumped hydroelectric energy storage, but replace water with custom-made composite blocks that can be made from low-cost and locally sourced materials,” he says.

Anytime, anywhere

As solar and wind energies gain traction to replace fossil fuels such as coal, gas and oil, the full potential of both renewable energies has been hampered by a simple fact of nature: The sun doesn’t always shine, and the wind doesn’t always blow. This is where gravity power can fill a crucial niche. The beauty of this technology is that it can be harnessed at any time, is relatively cheap and is viable almost anywhere.

Energy Vault CEO and co-founder Robert Piconi. Courtesy of Energy Vault

In fact, it is intended to complement rather than replace other renewable energies – so much so that it needs to be near a grid connection that supports renewable energy. When surplus renewable energy is stored, it is used to lift the heavy mass to its potential height. Then, when solar and wind sources are unable to deliver during peak periods of electricity use, the mass is lowered to its original position to generate energy.

Energy storage is fast becoming big business for investors – the global market is expected to attract about USD 620 billion in investment by 2040, according to BloombergNEF forecasts. Currently, this segment is dominated by chemical batteries, with lithium-ion making up 93 percent of the energy storage technology mix in 2020, based on figures published by the International Energy Agency.

“[Gravity] technology responds to a key bottleneck in renewable energy–dominated power grids,” says Adriaan Korthuis, co-founder and managing partner of Climate Focus in Amsterdam. “Storage of electricity is a major challenge in our global transition to renewable energy.”

Cheaper and cleaner

Generating power through gravity is also much cheaper and cleaner than renewable energies that rely on chemical batteries for storage. At 6.5 cents per kilowatt hour, it costs less than half that of lithium-ion, which degrades over time and has a potentially severe environmental impact through mining and disposal, according to Gravity Power.

Based on the ‘levelized cost of energy’ – a standard benchmark that measures the total cost of running a facility divided by the electricity it is expected to produce over its lifetime – gravity power is much more cost-effective than pumped-storage hydro, hydrogen, power-flow and lithium-ion technologies, according to the company.

Grid-connected energy storage is needed in three categories: short duration (less than 1 hour) to regulate frequency; long duration (8 to 16 hours) for shifting from higher-emitting to lower-emitting power sources in a day, known as ‘intraday generation shifting’; and very long duration (days, weeks or seasons) for occasional periods when renewable energy underproduces, according to Taber.

“The wind and solar industries have grown rapidly because the buyers of power made long-term, fixed-price purchase agreements available,” Taber says. “A similar [purchasing] instrument will accelerate the addition of long-duration energy storage to the grid.”

Korthuis of Climate Focus assesses the technology with a more cautious tone.

“The obvious challenges of this technology, as with any technology in early stages of development, are in its possibilities to scale, and in energy loss when converting electricity to storage and from stored energy back to electricity,” he says.

Sustainable bricks

Energy Vault takes a different approach to gravity power by constructing towers the size of a 20-story building. It provides electricity through a 100 megawatt-per-hour crane-operated system run by artificial intelligence to generate kinetic energy when the grid requires additional supply. Composite bricks of local soil, mine tailings, coal ash and decommissioned wind turbine blades are used as weights, thereby repurposing material destined for landfills and avoiding the use of emissions-causing concrete.

Expanding gravity-powered batteries could reduce the need for lithium. Oton Barros, DSR/OBT/INPE

The Lugano, Switzerland-based company has attracted investors such as Softbank (USD 110 million), Saudi Aramco and BHP, the world’s biggest mining company. Mining companies are able to profit from the technology by redeploying abandoned infrastructure of decommissioned mines and by diversifying their strategy as nations rapidly shift to renewable energies.

China Tianying, a publicly traded recycling company in China, has also committed USD 50 million to Energy Vault’s initial public offering and another USD 50 million for a license to use the technology.

“Following successful research and development, and proving our technology at demonstration scale, we are now commercializing and deploying our technology globally, beginning in China where we have broken ground on our first EVx gravity energy storage system, with additional near-term deployments planned in the U.S. and Australia,” says Piconi.

A 100-megawatt hour project with Energy Vault began in China in March 2022. The company sees great potential for the technology’s uptake in emerging markets, such as China and India, which are among the world’s largest emitters of greenhouse gases.

The transition to renewable energy promises to gain momentum with the advent of this fledgling industry, whose leaders see few impediments to its widespread adoption besides access to enough land for their tall towers and subterranean shafts. Gravity may yet prove to be the missing link in the energy chain that boosts the potential of sun and wind to decarbonize the world’s electricity grids.

David Henry writes for Landscape News.

Via Landscape News

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Dumping Russian Gas: 4 European countries seek 65 GW Offshore Wind by 2030, as EU Pledges $314 bn. for Green Energy https://www.juancole.com/2022/05/european-countries-offshore.html Fri, 20 May 2022 05:35:35 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=204738 Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Anyone who follows the climate emergency and extreme weather events would think the serial catastrophes of the past couple years would be enough to put the governments into crisis mode in moving swiftly to green energy. It turns out that for Europe, at least, it took the Russian invasion of Ukraine to concentrate the mind. Europe is heavily dependent on Russian petroleum and methane gas, an unenviable position given that they are now thereby funding the Russian war effort.

The European Union set a goal for member states of collectively investing $314 billion in the green energy transition by 2030, with two-thirds of that to be spent in just the next 5 years, by 2027. This commitment is on top of the plans the 27 member states already had.

The new goal is to get 45% of Europe’s electricity from renewables by 2030, up from a previous goal of 40%.

In addition, the Energy ministers of Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and Denmark issued a manifesto of energy independence from Russian methane gas on Wednesday, pledging themselves to create massive new wind farms in the North Sea off their coasts that will have a capacity of 65 gigawatts (GW) by 2030 and 130 GW by 2050. The European Union only has about 16 gigawatts of offshore wind installed at the moment, so they are planning to increase that by almost ten times by 2050.

The Biden adminstration’s goal for offshore wind by 2030 is only 30 gigawatts, so these four countries are aiming higher than the entire US.

Denmark and Germany already had big plans for expanding offshore wind but they are now increasing their goals. The four states are also innovating in making plans for multiple connections so that the wind farms will supply a common four-country grid. In fact, they say they want to work toward a pan-Europe grid.

They also want to innovate: “We will monitor the development of technology for solar photovoltaic within offshore wind farms.” Wind turbine/ PV solar hybrid installations produce energy more efficiently and more inexpensively.

Denmark has an artificial wind energy island on the drawing board, but now Belgium will also construct one. Indeed, all four countries will “begin planning for multiple energy hubs and islands.”

The four countries also pledged to speed up permitting, a major bottleneck for wind farms in Europe. The ministers insist, “renewable energy should be considered as being in the overriding public interest and serving public safety.”

Nikolaus J. Kurmayer at Euractiv.com quotes European commission President Ursula von der Leyen as saying, “Nowadays we have permitting times between six and nine years.” She said that these would be reduce to one year in certain “go-to” areas, i.e. high-priority green zones, including the country of Denmark.

If these plans are implemented, they will likely have unforeseen side effects, such as impelling technological innovation by European scientists and companies in the green energy space, and increasing the efficiency and lowering the cost of wind and solar.

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The Best Battery is Nature’s Own: How Pumped Hydro is the Future of Renewables https://www.juancole.com/2022/01/battery-natures-renewables.html Thu, 20 Jan 2022 05:02:23 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=202511 By Andrew Blakers,Bin Lu, and Matthew Stocks | –

To cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in half within a decade, the Biden administration’s goal, the U.S. is going to need a lot more solar and wind power generation, and lots of cheap energy storage.

Wind and solar power vary over the course of a day, so energy storage is essential to provide a continuous flow of electricity. But today’s batteries are typically quite small and store enough energy for only a few hours of electricity. To rely more on wind and solar power, the U.S. will need more overnight and longer-term storage as well.

While battery innovations get a lot of attention, there’s a simple, proven long-term storage technique that’s been used in the U.S. since the 1920s.

It’s called pumped hydro energy storage. It involves pumping water uphill from one reservoir to another at a higher elevation for storage, then, when power is needed, releasing the water to flow downhill through turbines, generating electricity on its way to the lower reservoir.

Illustration of two open- and closed-loop hydro storage systems. Closed-loop systems use two reservoirs rather than running water.
Two types of pumped-storage hydropower; one doesn’t require a river.
NREL

Pumped hydro storage is often overlooked in the U.S. because of concern about hydropower’s impact on rivers. But what many people don’t realize is that most of the best hydro storage sites aren’t on rivers at all.

We created a world atlas of potential sites for closed-looped pumped hydro – systems that don’t include a river – and found 35,000 paired sites in the U.S. with good potential. While many of these sites, which we located by satellite, are in rugged terrain and may be unsuitable for geological, hydrological, economic, environmental or social reasons, we estimate that only a few hundred sites are needed to support a 100% renewable U.S. electricity system.

Why wind and solar need long-term storage

To function properly, power grids must be able to match the incoming electricity supply to electricity demand in real time or they risk shortages or overloads.

There are several techniques that grid managers can use to keep that balance with variable sources like wind and solar. These include sharing power across large regions via interstate high-voltage transmission lines, managing demand – and using energy storage.

Aerial view of a pumped hydro project's two reservoirs and solar array on a dry landscape
The Kidston pumped hydro project in Australia uses an old gold mine for reservoirs.
Genex Power

Batteries deployed in homes, power stations and electric vehicles are preferred for energy storage times up to a few hours. They’re adept at managing the rise of solar power midday when the sun is overhead and releasing it when power demand peaks in the evenings.

Pumped hydro, on the other hand, allows for larger and longer storage than batteries, and that is essential in a wind- and solar-dominated electricity system. It is also cheaper for overnight and longer-term storage.

Off-river pumped hydro energy storage

In 2021, the U.S. had 43 operating pumped hydro plants with a total generating capacity of about 22 gigawatts and an energy storage capacity of 553 gigawatt-hours. They make up 93% of utility-scale storage in the country. Globally, pumped hydro’s share of energy storage is even higher – about 99% of energy storage volume.

Pump hydro projects can be controversial, particularly when they involve dams on rivers that flood land to create new reservoirs and can affect ecosystems.

Creating closed-loop systems that use pairs of existing lakes or reservoirs instead of rivers would avoid the need for new dams. A project planned in Bell County, Kentucky, for example, uses an old coal strip mine. Little additional land is needed except for transmission lines.

Satellite image showing potential pairings of reservoirs in a mountain area.
Examples from the atlas of off-river reservoirs with the potential to be paired for pumped hydro near Castle Rock, Colorado.
Andrew Blakers, CC BY

An off-river pumped hydro system comprises a pair of reservoirs spaced several miles apart with an altitude difference of 200-800 meters (about 650-2,600 feet) and connected with pipes or tunnels. The reservoirs can be new or use old mining sites or existing lakes or reservoirs.

On sunny or windy days, water is pumped to the upper reservoir. At night, the water flows back down through the turbines to recover the stored energy.

A pair of 250-acre reservoirs with an altitude difference of 600 meters (1,969 feet) and 20-meter depth (65 feet) can store 24 gigawatt-hours of energy, meaning the system could supply 1 gigawatt of power for 24 hours, enough for a city of a million people.

Australian Renewable Energy Agency: “How will pumped hydro energy storage power our future?”

The water can cycle between upper and lower reservoirs for a hundred years or more. Evaporation suppressors – small objects floating on the water to trap humid air – can help reduce water evaporation. In all, the amount of water needed to support a 100% renewable electricity system is about 3 liters per person per day, equivalent to 20 seconds of a morning shower. This is one-tenth of the water evaporated per person per day in the cooling systems of U.S. fossil fuel power stations.

Storage to support 100% renewables

Little pumped storage has been built in the U.S. in recent years because there hasn’t been much need, but that’s changing.

In 2020, about three-quarters of all new power capacity built was either solar photovoltaics or wind power. Their costs have been falling, making them cheaper to build in many areas than fossil fuels.

Australia is installing solar and wind three times faster per capita than the U.S. and is already facing the need for mass storage. It has two systems under construction that are designed to have more energy storage than all the utility batteries in the world put together; another dozen are under serious consideration. None involve new dams on rivers. The annual operating cost is low, and the working fluid is water rather than battery chemicals.

Shifting electricity to renewable energy and then electrifying vehicles and heating can eliminate most human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. The U.S. has vast potential for off-river pumped hydro storage to help this happen, and it will need it as wind and solar power expand.

[More than 140,000 readers get one of The Conversation’s informative newsletters. Join the list today.]The Conversation

Andrew Blakers, Professor of Engineering, Australian National University; Bin Lu, Research Fellow, Australian National University, and Matthew Stocks, Research Fellow, ANU College of Engineering and Computer Science, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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