Australian company RayGen is tackling a problem that faces all solar farms: how to deal with the Sun’s intermittency in a way that makes economic sense. In temperate, cloudy locations such as the UK, the problem is often not enough sunlight. But where the Sun can be ferocious in the middle of the day – including a large part of Australia – electricity generation can threaten to overpower the grid. Raygen’s solution is to capture solar energy at high efficiencies, then store excess energy as a heat differential between two pools of water.

So can this technology be a game-changer in the global shift to renewable energy? To find out more, watch the video, or read the Physics World article ‘Combining solar power with thermal storage to avoid wasting energy‘ by science writer Richard Stevenson.