Energy storage technologies for sustainable development

The world is racing toward the cusp of energy storage systems employing alternate methods to meet the global energy demands. To allow for maximum utilization of energy from intermittent renewables, energy storage technology is the key. Though the knowledge of conventional energy storage systems is well known, the present-day development and the recent advances call for an in-depth understanding. When demand is detected at the power grid these units can supply energy to reduce the load at any given instant of time. The varying supply of energy from solar or wind power makes it difficult to be integrated directly into the grid. The main idea is to simultaneously collect energy from the renewables, convert, and finally store them in energy storage units. In this chapter, we focus on the energy storage technologies like supercapacitors, batteries, fuel cells, etc., and their current trend in the energy race. We also focus on the bigger perspective of probable areas of research in metal chalcogenides considering the growing interest of the research community.