MorganEnergy

With the rapid increase in wind and solar generation has come a great deal of concern about the intermittent nature of the power that such systems provide. Consequently a great deal of research is going into systems that might allow that power to be stored more effectively. One of the current front-runners is the molten salt battery, which actually stores heat rather than electricity. A possible new technology that stores electricity is a capacitor made from sheets of graphene. Capacitors have the advantage of being usable on a small scale in electric vehicles and even electronic devices as well.

For real cutting edge research, however, Nature has an article about the feasibility of building orbital death rays satellites to beam solar power to earth.