Researchers Refine a Device That Can Both Harvest and Store Solar Energy, and They Hope It Will One Day Bring Electricity To Rural and Underdeveloped Areas (theverge.com) 51
An anonymous reader shares a report: The problem of energy storage has led to many creative solutions, like giant batteries. For a paper published today in the journal Chem, scientists trying to improve the solar cells themselves developed an integrated battery that works in three different ways. It can work like a normal solar cell by converting sunlight to electricity immediately, explains study author Song Jin, a chemist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. It can store the solar energy, or it can simply be charged like a normal battery. It's a combination of two existing technologies: solar cells that harvest light, and a so-called flow battery. The most commonly used batteries, lithium-ion, store energy in solid materials, like various metals. Flow batteries, on the other hand, store energy in external liquid tanks. This means they are very easy to scale for large projects. Scaling up all the components of a lithium-ion battery might throw off the engineering, but for flow batteries, "you just make the tank bigger," says Timothy Cook, a University at Buffalo chemist and flow battery expert not involved in the study. "You really simplify how to make the battery grow in capacity," he adds. "We're not making flow batteries to power a cell phone, we're thinking about buildings or industrial sites.
Mars (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Mars (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Sounds great, but the problem is how much it will cost. Even Space X launches cost money. Rocket fuel is expensive as is the hardware that burns it. Reuse helps, but you still have to pay the fuel bill and for refurbishing the first stages.
Flow batteries are pretty heavy, given they are filled with liquids and the higher you drive the capacity, the bigger and heaver they are. 500W/Kg is pretty heavy for power storage, and that is for the really dangerous liquid kind. The water based stuff is 1/10th th
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Umm, no. Rocket fuel is dirt cheap.
LOX costs considerably less than gasoline. Kerosene or Methane is comparable to gasoline prices.
Now, getting enough rocket fuel into orbit for interplanetary work is expensive....
Re: (Score:2)
Umm, no. Rocket fuel is dirt cheap.
LOX costs considerably less than gasoline. Kerosene or Methane is comparable to gasoline prices.
Now, getting enough rocket fuel into orbit for interplanetary work is expensive....
LOL, It may be cheaper by the pound or gallon, but when you need more then ten million pounds of the stuff to fill the tank for another launch, it gets pretty expensive. Maybe they get a volume discount?
Re: (Score:2)
but when you need more then ten million pounds of the stuff to fill the tank for another launch, it gets pretty expensive
Around $1.5M or so. Peanuts, when you consider all the other things.
What Is It? (Score:2)
My first thought was, what is this "liquid"?
How many gallons would it need to run a house?
Is it Toxic? Corrosive? Environmentally dangerous in some way?
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
My first thought was, what is this "liquid"?
It is methyl viologen di-chloride [wikipedia.org], an organic compound.
How many gallons would it need to run a house?
The energy density is 126 Wh/L. So if you need 10 kwhr to make it through the night, that would be about 80 liters or 20 gallons.
Is it Toxic?
A related compound is used as an herbicide (Paraquat).
TFA leaves out the most important point: WTF is the point of integrating the battery and solar panel into a single device? None that I can see. Wouldn't it make far more sense to have two independent devices that can be maintained and/or replaced separately?
So they took
Re: (Score:3)
You seem to have read the article or the original paper yet failed to understand that the solar flow battery is not "two pre-existing ideas" simply combined together but a single device that stores solar energy directly as chemical energy that can be extracted as electricity later. It is not an electric device charging a separate battery. This is a new and different technology.
Not overwhelmed by the overall conversion efficiency of 14.1%? Well, that was about where the best silicon solar cells were stuck at
Re: (Score:2)
a single device that stores solar energy directly as chemical energy that can be extracted as electricity later.
That is not what the paper says. It clearly states that the solar collector is PV, which produces electricity, not "chemicals".
Once the energy is in the form of electricity, you can use a wire to move it anywhere. So why put the redox battery on an exposed hot roof, rather than a cool garage or closet?
It is not an electric device charging a separate battery.
I don't see anything in TFA or the paper which leads to this conclusion,
Re: (Score:2)
Right - wealth can't be created. That's why our population has exploded and yet standard of living improves. It's all a fixed pie, and we're taking smaller and smaller portions but we don't notice because... Libertarians.
Non-story? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Ok, so any time you take a solar panel and add some kind of energy storage device, that's a story now? There are a lot of ways you can store the energy - many different battery types, pumped water storage, molten salt I suppose. This is just silly.
But this one is special, because it can "Bring Electricity To Rural and Underdeveloped Areas", unlike any other solar panel connected to a battery.
Re: (Score:2)
Ok, so any time you take a solar panel and add some kind of energy storage device, that's a story now? There are a lot of ways you can store the energy - many different battery types, pumped water storage, molten salt I suppose. This is just silly.
But this one is special, because it can "Bring Electricity To Rural and Underdeveloped Areas", unlike any other solar panel connected to a battery.
But can it teach girls to code, and do something with, er, intersectionalities, whatever those are?
That's what we're all wondering.
Re: (Score:2)
They'll need at least one of us to jizz into a jar. They'll probably make it into a reality TV show.
Re: (Score:3)
Yeah I'm struggling to understand the advantage of integrating the storage into the panel. I suppose for some places it means noneed to find a place to put the battery bank. Maybe the total system round-trip efficiency gets a small bump... but... those seem like really minor accomplishments.
Not as silly as the orbiting solar array death ray stuff, or even the seemingly unending quest to revive H2 cars when batteries are just going to eat their lunch, but it strikes me as a dead end pursuit unless they hav
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah I'm struggling to understand the advantage of integrating the storage into the panel.
By putting the battery with the panel, on the roof, it is exposed to weather and temperature fluctuations, so it degrades faster and creates jobs for maintenance workers.
Re: (Score:3)
Ok, so any time you take a solar panel and add some kind of energy storage device, that's a story now? There are a lot of ways you can store the energy - many different battery types, pumped water storage, molten salt I suppose. This is just silly.
You know, you are right. It's not like Lead acid batteries haven't been used in remote places with Solar Cells for decades..
Re: (Score:2)
The problem with battery storage is efficiency, price and scale.
I could get some solar panels, and a normal battery pack and power my home off grid however if I were to get central AC/switch from Oil heat to Electric. Then shortly my power consumption will exceed my ability to self generate. So I will need to get more expensive batteries, and more solar panel space. Which is expensive.
If a small town has an energy storage method that can deal with growth in demand by just adding a bigger tank, or filling a
Re: (Score:2)
The problem with battery storage is efficiency, price and scale.
No, it's efficiency and PRICE.
If you lose half your input energy, it doesn't matter what you paid for your storage capacity, it's not worth it. If you get 90% back, it might be worth paying a lot more for your storage capacity.
Re: (Score:2)
the optimistic 25% efficiency of the battery they are proposing.
TFA is written very poorly, but I think they mean the combined efficiency of the panel + battery. So 25% of incident solar energy would end up in the battery (in the best case). That would be very good.
If the 25% is just the battery, then that is horrible, and makes no sense at all.
Re: (Score:2)
That efficiency is including the efficiency of the solar panel. If you can really get 25% efficiency in electricity out of the battery from sunlight (they are currently getting 14.1%) then that is the equivalent of a 29.5% PV cell hooked up to a lead acid battery, or a 25% PV cell hooked up to lithium ion. The best commercial cells are currently about 21.5%.
So there is no "60% more solar panel" required if this technology pays-off. There would be less panel (unless regular PV rises to match or exceed it).
Re: (Score:2)
Ok, so any time you take a solar panel and add some kind of energy storage device, that's a story now? There are a lot of ways you can store the energy - many different battery types, pumped water storage, molten salt I suppose. This is just silly.
But that's not what this is. This is a new type of photocell system that converts solar energy directly into stored chemical energy. That is not a solar panel hooked up to a battery. And though the research is at fairly early stage, the sunlight-to-electricity-from-the-battery efficiency is 14.1% better than you would get from hooking a 16% commercial panel (this is mid-low range panel currently on the market) to a lead-acid battery. We will have to see how far this technology can be developed. It took sili
Why not power electric cars with it? (Score:1)
I imagine a remote electric 'gas station' where you would exchange the used liquid in your car's flow battery for freshly-charged liquid. The station itself could even be solar. No more sitting for an hour at a recharge station waiting for your Tesla's battery to get topped off - a recharge stop would only take as long as pumping gas does now. Used fluid would go back to the station to be recharged.
Using a Tesla Model 3's stated average power consumption, about 2 liters of charged liquid battery per hour
Re: (Score:2)
about 2 liters of charged liquid battery per hour of driving should be enough.
No. A Telsa uses about 0.3 kwhr per mile. So at 130 whr/L you would need 2 liters per MILE not per hour.
That is about a 1/4 the volumetric energy density of lithium batteries.
MVCl2 flow batteries make no sense for vehicles.
Re: (Score:1)
My bad. I read on a Tesla forum the model 3 would use between 240-300 whr per hour, when the poster on that forum should have said 'per mile'. Should have realized it wasn't that small amount of juice to push a car.
It may still be somewhat viable though - considering that a Tesla battery weighs 530kg, the equivalent fluid by weight may be enough for 250 miles of range. There is the problem of transferring 146 gallons of fluid at a fill-up though.
Re: (Score:2)
Such things have already appeared, but using solid battery fuel - aluminum plates. It is an Israeli start-up created in 2008 called Phinergy [thedetroitbureau.com]. This is a mature technology, but I don't know how their adoption is going. The company still seems to be around. [phinergy.com]
Already there? (Score:1)