Can renewable energy provide reliable power? Will it need extensive backup? The energy available from wind, waves, tides and the sun varies in ways that may not match variations in energy demand. Assimilating these fluctuations can affect the operation and economics of electricity networks, markets and the output of other forms of generation. Is this a significant problem, or can these new sources be integrated into the grid system without the need for extensive backup or energy storage capacity? This book examines the significance of the issue of variability of renewable electricity supplies, and presents technical and operational solutions to the problem of reconciling the differing patterns of supply and demand. Its chapters are authored by leading experts in the field, who aim to explain and quantify the impacts of variability in renewable energy, and in doing so, dispel many of the myths and misunderstandings surrounding the topic.

Scripture, and especially the Book of Psalms, has always formed the substance of the daily prayer of Christian monks and nuns. Monastic men and women spend more time among the scriptures each day than in most other activities. How do such regular interactions with the texts of the Old and New Testaments help us renew our Christian imaginations; how might these reflective encounters enable all of us to discover the wind of the Spirit, the fountain of living water and the fire from which God speaks, within the printed pages of our Bibles?

In The Wind, the Fountain and the Fire, Mark Barrett, a Benedictine monk of Worth Abbey, offers a Lenten pathway through scripture, opening the gateway of sacred imagery as a mode of prayerful reflection. For each week of Lent he has selected a different image: the Dust; the Mountain; the Well; the Light and the Tomb. In these richly imagined biblical symbols we are invited to find keys which can unlock both our experience of scripture and our understanding of our own hearts.

Illuminates the spiritual journey we all take and the choices we all take and the choices we make by focusing on five of the monastic hours, from Vigils which reflect on the edges of the day and our own difficulty in choosing to begin the journey, through Compline or night prayer, the time for letting go and remembering the reality of death. Full of humor and eloquently written, Crossing shows Christians how to bring faith and human experience together."

Mark Barrett's concern when writing Crossing was to offer a way for those who do not live in monasteries to access something of what is a daily experience among supposed religious specialists. He hoped that the reader would find that monastics - so often the shadowy medieval figures of media-gothic - are in reality fellow-seekers, apprentices training among the tools of a spiritual workshop. Monastic practices are not a panacea for the ills of modern society, and it would be naive to suggest they can be. The point is rather that Christian monastic practices came into being at least in part as a responce to the tidal currents of our hearts, set swirling by our busy lives, whichever century we live in.