Scientists have teamed up to explore how a combination of solar panels, wind turbines, and battery storage could help lower costs and reduce reliance on dirty fuels for researchers at the South Pole.
Two U.S. Department of Energy laboratories — the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and Argonne National Laboratory — have done the math and see a path to viability for replacing most diesel use with clean energy, per a report by CleanTechnica.
The various outposts in Antarctica are hard to get to, as you can imagine. Currently, these outposts have relied on diesel as the primary fuel source. All of that fuel is either flown or trucked to the South Pole from a station about 850 miles away (not to mention the original shipment to Antarctica), which compounds the carbon impact its use has on the environment, as CleanTechnica detailed.
Amy Bender, a physicist at Argonne and co-author of a feasibility report on renewables in the area, shared that "power is just a very limited resource at the South Pole." So it's no surprise that the National Science Foundation (NSF) ran studies with solar panels as far back as 2000, and the NREL followed up with a wind turbine study five years later.
"The South Pole is one of the most extreme places on the planet," said Ian Baring-Gould, the Wind Technology Deployment manager at NREL, per CleanTechnica. However, he added that "there's nothing really complicated here from a technology standpoint."
As the report details, the differences in financial cost are clear. Diesel fuel costs $4.09 per kilowatt-hour, while wind is 33 cents and solar is 23 cents for the same output, according to numbers cited by CleanTechnica. The new report outlines a hybrid system involving six wind turbines, 180 kilowatts' worth of solar panels, and 3.4 megawatt hours of battery energy storage.
That could reduce the use of diesel by approximately 95% annually, helping to minimize the environmental impact of burning that dirty resource and conserve the location's pristine nature.
Human exposure to diesel exhaust can cause serious health conditions, and the pollution is linked to the generation of ground-level ozone and acid rain, which can damage the soil, water, and food chain in many locations.
Baring-Gould shared in the CleanTechnica report that the new study "reaffirms really clearly that any place on the planet where you're running diesel fuel, you should be thinking about renewables as a real viable option."
The solar panels and wind turbines can likely withstand temperatures of 70 degrees below zero, but placement has to be planned carefully. The researchers proposed that solar arrays could be laid out vertically to reduce snow accumulation, and turbines would need to be anchored to the ice.
There are still some hurdles to advancing these plans, but as Baring-Gould concluded: "We can do this. That's not the problem. But we do need to do that homework to make sure that we do it right and we're successful at it."
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