Editing Pieee (section)

==Scope==
The sustainable green energy system of the future is sometimes envisioned as having three parts:  (i) widely distributed generation of electricity from sun, wind, and other; (ii) a low‐loss electrical backbone for moving vast quantities of energy from regions of plenty to regions of scarcity; and (iii) local distribution to smart loads.  This Special Issue will focus on the missing link between (ii) and (iii) – the difficult and often-neglected problem of matching the electrical outputs from intermittent renewable sources such as solar thermal (or solar photovoltaic or tidal or wind, etc.) to a time varying consumer demand which can be modulated only so far. This is known as the ''intermittency challenge''.  A promising resolution to this challenge is the creation of a robust, long‐life, low‐loss grid that delivers, in times of plenty, surplus electrical energy to massive regional storage reservoirs near the end-users. These reservoirs save the energy in any convenient form and back-transform it into grid power during times of local shortage. This Special Issue will discuss selected aspects of the Intermittency Challenge, with a pervasive emphasis on intuitive understanding of the technologies described, on their currently achievable performance and robustness, and on the near-term prospects for their performance improvement.  In particular, chemical storage will focus on the challenges of a solar hydrogen economy and the production, storage, and utilization of hydrogen for off-grid energy requirements such as automotive transport.  Papers on mechanical and thermal storage will focus on the back-conversion of energy stores into electricity for the local grid.