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Sexual systems in plants have evolved from bisexual flowers in which stamens and pistils coexist, to separate female and male plants. However, cultivated persimmons produce both male and female flowers on a single tree, and in rare cases, it is known that male flowers can be ancestral to bisexual flowers.

This is the sixth installment in a series of stories in which Yutaka Minakawa, a young employee of a trading company, reads and analyzes proposal papers by the Center for Low Carbon Society Strategy (LCS). In the last installment, Minagawa learned about pumped-storage power generation as a technology for storing energy that is indispensable to the creation of an electric power structure for 2050. In this installment, he asked LCS Deputy Director-General Noboru Taniguchi and LCS researcher Junichiro Otomo about the current technologies related to storage batteries and hydrogen, which, together with pumped storage hydropower, are vital to decarbonization through renewable energy, and about their future prospects.