A newly invented battery, designed by the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford, could one day power the grid using solar and wind generated energy.
The secret is in the way the battery is produced. The material it is composed of must be very economical for the scale involved.
The new battery is believed to be the best design yet for such efficient use of energy.
The power grid as it operates now needs a constant flow of energy on which to feed. Any changes in the flow can cause a catastrophic loss of power. Until now sun and wind generated energy were not good candidates for the grid, because of the very nature of the power source. The only way it could be used efficiently in a power grid would be to find a way to store the energy in order to smooth out the peaks and valleys of these intermittent forms of power.
Until now batteries used for this purpose, appropriately called 'flow' batteries, could easily be scaled to the appropriate requirements and be geared to large scale production.
But flow batteries are expensive because of the liquids it contains, especially in the quantities that would be needed for large scale operations.
That's where the newly invented battery comes in. The new battery uses only one stream of molecules and does not need a membrane at all. Its molecules consist of mundane materials such as lithium and sulfur.
Not only but in lab tests, the new batteries did not lose any of their storage percentage, even after 2,000 charges and discharges which would amount to more than 5.5 years of daily use, making it an ideal solution for harnessing solar and wind for use in powering the grid.
Source : Science daily 4.25.13
No comments:
Post a Comment