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Browse Qlopedia topics grouped under Energy.
27 topics, showing 1-24 on page 1 of 2.
Waste heat recovery captures heat that would otherwise leave a process through exhaust, cooling water, hot surfaces, or warm products, then reuses it for heating, steam, electricity, preheating, district energy, or other useful work.
Wave energy captures the up-and-down, back-and-forth, and pressure-driven motion of ocean waves and turns it into useful electricity or mechanical work. It is a promising form of marine energy for coastal and island settings, but devices must survive harsh saltwater conditions, storms, maintenance challenges, and grid-connection costs before they can scale widely.
Floating offshore wind puts large wind turbines on buoyant platforms instead of fixed foundations. The idea opens windy deep-water areas that are hard to reach with seabed-mounted turbines, but it also adds demanding engineering around motion, mooring lines, dynamic cables, ports, vessels, ocean users, and grid connection.
Hydropower makes electricity from moving water, usually by sending river flow through turbines connected to generators. It can be a steady renewable source, a flexible grid resource, or a giant battery through pumped storage, but it also reshapes rivers and must be judged with ecological, safety, and community impacts in view.
Floating solar, also called floating photovoltaics or floatovoltaics, mounts solar panels on buoyant structures over reservoirs, ponds, canals, and other water bodies. It can generate clean electricity without occupying extra land, but it brings special engineering, ecological, permitting, and water-management questions.
Agrivoltaics is the practice of combining solar photovoltaic generation with farming, grazing, or habitat on the same land. Instead of treating solar arrays and agriculture as automatic competitors, agrivoltaic design asks whether shade, spacing, height, crops, animals, and farm operations can be planned together.
Vehicle-to-grid, or V2G, is a form of bidirectional electric-vehicle charging that lets a parked EV send power back to the electric grid. It turns compatible vehicles and chargers into flexible energy resources while still needing to protect the driver's mobility, the battery, the building, and the grid.
Grid-enhancing technologies are tools that help existing transmission lines carry electricity more efficiently and reliably. They combine sensors, software, controls, and planning methods so grid operators can see real limits, reroute power, reduce congestion, and connect more generation before every constraint becomes a new wires project.
A storage system that saves energy as heat or cold, then releases it later for buildings, industrial processes, district heating, or sometimes electricity generation.
A geothermal energy approach that creates or improves underground fluid pathways so hot rock can provide power or heat beyond naturally permeable geothermal fields.
Energy storage designed to deliver power for many hours, days, or longer so electric grids can ride through renewable lulls, demand peaks, and outages.
An advanced inverter control approach that can establish voltage and frequency for power systems with high levels of solar, wind, batteries, and other inverter-based resources.
A high-capacity heat pump that upgrades waste, ambient, or low-temperature heat into useful process heat for factories, district systems, and other large energy users.
A virtual power plant, or VPP, is a coordinated network of distributed energy resources that can act like a single grid resource. It may combine batteries, rooftop solar, smart thermostats, EV chargers, water heaters, generators, and flexible loads through software, controls, and market rules.
Demand response is the practice of changing electricity use in response to prices, incentives, or grid reliability signals. Instead of only increasing power supply during stressful hours, utilities and grid operators can ask customers or devices to reduce, shift, or sometimes increase load at useful times.
District cooling supplies chilled water from a central plant or network to multiple buildings for air conditioning and process cooling. By sharing equipment, pipes, storage, and heat-rejection systems, it can improve efficiency and reliability in dense campuses and urban districts.
A flow battery is a rechargeable battery that stores energy in liquid electrolytes held in external tanks and pumped through an electrochemical cell stack. Flow batteries are often studied for stationary and grid-scale storage because energy capacity can be increased by enlarging tanks while power depends mainly on the stack.
A sodium-ion battery is a rechargeable battery that moves sodium ions between electrodes during charge and discharge. It is being developed as a lower-cost, more abundant-material alternative to some lithium-ion batteries, especially for grid storage, stationary backup power, and other uses where maximum energy density is not the only priority.
Green ammonia is ammonia made with hydrogen from low-carbon or renewable electricity instead of hydrogen from fossil fuels. It is discussed as a way to decarbonize fertilizer production, store hydrogen in a denser chemical form, and supply future fuels for shipping or power.
A geothermal heat pump, also called a ground-source heat pump, uses the relatively steady temperature below ground to heat and cool buildings. It moves heat with buried loops, circulating fluid, and a heat pump rather than burning fuel at the point of use.
Thermal energy storage saves heat or cold for later use. It can shift heating, cooling, and power demand across hours, days, or seasons using water tanks, rocks, molten salts, phase change materials, underground storage, or thermochemical reactions.
District heating is a system that delivers heat from one or more central or shared sources to multiple buildings through insulated pipes. It can use combined heat and power, waste heat, geothermal energy, large heat pumps, boilers, or solar thermal heat.
A perovskite solar cell is a photovoltaic device that uses a light-absorbing material with a perovskite-like crystal structure. These cells can be efficient, thin, lightweight, and tunable, but durability and manufacturing remain central challenges.
A microgrid is a local electric system that can operate with the main grid or disconnect and run on its own. It combines loads, controls, generation, storage, and protection equipment within a defined electrical boundary.