Wolfram Jörß: Independent is a huge word, but I see a big future for zeollite and other kinds of heat storage technologies. Heat storage hasn't been too much a topic of research in the last twenty years, so there's much to do now, and, well, there a lot of chances.

Wolfram Jörß: Yes, now we know it's not endlessly there. We have to deal with the CO2 emission topics and that's where everybody thinks about saving energy and storing energy is a way of saving energy.

Wolfram Jörß: Well, another example would be the so-called phase change materials, which is more or less paraffins, like you know, from a candle. And they change their phase, they turn from solids to liquid and thus they store energy and it can be called back later when we want to use energy and this has been used in laboratories and I think there is a future too of that.

Wolfram Jörß: This is rather philosophical already. There's enough energy in the world. We have the sun, which is shining. But we need it. We need to convert it into useable energy, and this is dependent on the time of day and the time of year. And so we don't have it when we need it, and thus we need energy storage.

Wolfram Jörß: They are very important especially for the domestic applications and they would enable us to use much more solar energy in houses, for example.

Wolfram Jörß: Yes. We can use the heat storage systems like we know in our houses, heat, hot water, and the boiler systems and we can upscale it so we can use solar energy from summer in winter. This is being built in a demonstration project now in Germany.

Wolfram Jörß: Yeah, it's important to go into storage of electricity, too. So for example, compressed air storage is a topic there. It's being explored, and excess electricity is used to press air into a geological cavern and there it is stored and then it can be released and thus electricity can be formed again and so this will be one of the methods to do that.