A UK, Birmingham University professor of energy and his team have come up with a shortcut to getting dispatchable energy out of a combination of wind farms and wave power. Professor Xiao-Ping Zhang, Director of Smart Grid, Birmingham Energy Institute at the University of Birmingham explained his new system in detail in a paper delivered to the IEEE which can be read here. He revealed the research to the world when he gave a speech last week at the 2019 UNESCO International Water Conference, in Paris. The whole idea is to use wind and wave turbines in sync with one another so that the wind turbine smooths the highly intermittent energy produced by waves, which fluctuate wildly every 5 to…