Battery advance could boost renewable energy take-up

US researchers have made an important step forward in the quest to store electricity from intermittent energy sources such as wind and solar.

A Harvard University team came up with a way to drive down the cost of flow battery technology, which is capable of storing energy on large scales - within an electrical power grid, for example. Grid-scale storage for renewables could be a game-changer - making wind and solar more economical and reliable.

While flow battery designs are suited to storing large amounts of energy cheaply, they have previously relied on chemicals that are expensive or difficult to maintain, driving up costs.

Most previous flow batteries have chemistries based on metals. Vanadium is used in the most commercially advanced flow battery technology, but its cost is relatively high. Other variants contain precious metal catalysts such as platinum. The researchers say their new battery already performs as well as vanadium flow batteries, but uses no precious metal catalyst and has an underlying chemistry that is metal-free, instead relying on naturally abundant, more affordable chemicals called quinones. These water-soluble compounds are organic (carbon-based) and are similar to chemicals that store energy in plants and animals.

"These molecules are cheap and they're in all green vegetables, as well as crude oil," said co-author Michael Aziz from the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) in Cambridge, Massachusetts....


http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-25674738

Well, that definitely sounds like a step in the right direction Tess.

Sassy wrote:Well, that definitely sounds like a step in the right direction Tess.

I think it's great. I've got room for loads of solar panels, but it's no good having them if it costs a fortune to store the electricity. If that got cheap it'd be brilliant - no electric bills.

Tesstacious wrote:

Sassy wrote:Well, that definitely sounds like a step in the right direction Tess.

I think it's great.  I've got room for loads of solar panels, but it's no good having them if it costs a fortune to store the electricity.  If that got cheap it'd be brilliant - no electric bills.

Sounds fantastic. I have also been looking at designs for wind turbines. One that really interested me was like a single upright spiral. A farm in America has it, and it supplies all their electricity.

Sassy wrote:

Tesstacious wrote:
I think it's great.  I've got room for loads of solar panels, but it's no good having them if it costs a fortune to store the electricity.  If that got cheap it'd be brilliant - no electric bills.

Sounds fantastic.   I have also been looking at designs for wind turbines.   One that really interested me was like a single upright spiral.   A farm in America has it, and it supplies all their electricity.

There are a few wind turbines here - not surprising given our weather! I don't like the idea though, they cause too many bird deaths.