Without a good way to store electricity on a large scale, solar power is useless at night. One promising storage option is a new kind of battery made with all-liquid active materials. Prototypes suggest that these liquid batteries will cost less than a third as much as today's best batteries and cou Contact online >>
Without a good way to store electricity on a large scale, solar power is useless at night. One promising storage option is a new kind of battery made with all-liquid active materials. Prototypes suggest that these liquid batteries will cost less than a third as much as today''s best batteries and could last significantly longer.
The battery is unlike any other. The electrodes are molten metals, and the electrolyte that conducts current between them is a molten salt. This results in an unusually resilient device that can quickly absorb large amounts of electricity. The electrodes can operate at electrical currents "tens of times higher than any [battery] that''s ever been measured," says Donald Sadoway, a materials chemistry professor at MIT and one of the battery''s inventors. What''s more, the materials are cheap, and the design allows for simple manufacturing.
The first prototype consists of a container surrounded by insulating material. The researchers add molten raw materials: antimony on the bottom, an electrolyte such as sodium sulfide in the middle, and magnesium at the top. Since each material has a different density, they naturally remain in distinct layers, which simplifies manufacturing. The container doubles as a current collector, delivering electrons from a power supply, such as solar panels, or carrying them away to the electrical grid to supply electricity to homes and businesses.
As power flows into the battery, magnesium and antimony metal are generated from magnesium antimonide dissolved in the electrolyte. When the cell discharges, the metals of the two electrodes dissolve to again form magnesium antimonide, which dissolves in the electrolyte, causing the electrolyte to grow larger and the electrodes to shrink (see above).
Sadoway envisions wiring together large cells to form enormous battery packs. One big enough to meet the peak electricity demand in New York City–about 13,000 megawatts–would fill nearly 60,000 square meters. Charging it would require solar farms of unprecedented size, generating not only enough electricity to meet daytime power needs but enough excess power to charge the batteries for nighttime demand. The first systems will probably store energy produced during periods of low electricity demand for use during peak demand, thus reducing the need for new power plants and transmission lines.
Many other ways of storing energy from intermittent power sources have been proposed, and some have been put to limited use. These range from stacks of lead-acid batteries to systems that pump water uphill during the day and let it flow back to spin generators at night. The liquid battery has the advantage of being cheap, long-lasting, and (unlike options such as pumping water) useful in a wide range of places. "No one had been able to get their arms around the problem of energy storage on a massive scale for the power grid," says Sadoway. "We''re literally looking at a battery capable of storing the grid."
Since creating the initial prototypes, the researchers have switched the metals and salts used; it wasn''t possible to dissolve magnesium antimonide in the electrolyte at high concentrations, so the first prototypes were too big to be practical. (Sadoway won''t identify the new materials but says they work along the same principles.) The team hopes that a commercial version of the battery will be available in five years.
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As California transitions rapidly to renewable fuels, it needs new technologies that can store power for the electric grid. Solar power drops at night and declines in winter. Wind power ebbs and flows. As a result, the state depends heavily on natural gas to smooth out highs and lows of renewable power.
"The electric grid uses energy at the same rate that you generate it, and if you''re not using it at that time, and you can''t store it, you must throw it away," said Robert Waymouth, the Robert Eckles Swain Professor in Chemistry in the School of Humanities and Sciences.
Waymouth is leading a Stanford team to explore an emerging technology for renewable energy storage: liquid organic hydrogen carriers (LOHCs). Hydrogen is already used as fuel or a means for generating electricity, but containing and transporting it is tricky.
"We are developing a new strategy for selectively converting and long-term storing of electrical energy in liquid fuels," said Waymouth, senior author of a study detailing this work in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. "We also discovered a novel, selective catalytic system for storing electrical energy in a liquid fuel without generating gaseous hydrogen."
Batteries used to store electricity for the grid – plus smartphone and electric vehicle batteries – use lithium-ion technologies. Due to the scale of energy storage, researchers continue to search for systems that can supplement those technologies.
Among the candidates are LOHCs, which can store and release hydrogen using catalysts and elevated temperatures. Someday, LOHCs could widely function as "liquid batteries," storing energy and efficiently returning it as usable fuel or electricity when needed.
The Waymouth team studies isopropanol and acetone as ingredients in hydrogen energy storage and release systems. Isopropanol – or rubbing alcohol – is a high-density liquid form of hydrogen that could be stored or transported through existing infrastructure until it''s time to use it as a fuel in a fuel cell or to release the hydrogen for use without emitting carbon dioxide.
Yet methods to produce isopropanol with electricity are inefficient. Two protons from water and two electrons can be converted into hydrogen gas, then a catalyst can produce isopropanol from this hydrogen. "But you don''t want hydrogen gas in this process," said Waymouth. "Its energy density per unit volume is low. We need a way to make isopropanol directly from protons and electrons without producing hydrogen gas."
Daniel Marron, lead author of this study who recently completed his Stanford PhD in chemistry, identified how to address this issue. He developed a catalyst system to combine two protons and two electrons with acetone to generate the LOHC isopropanol selectively, without generating hydrogen gas. He did this using iridium as the catalyst.
A key surprise was that cobaltocene was the magic additive. Cobaltocene, a chemical compound of cobalt, a non-precious metal, has long been used as a simple reducing agent and is relatively inexpensive. The researchers found that cobaltocene is unusually efficient when used as a co-catalyst in this reaction, directly delivering protons and electrons to the iridium catalyst rather than liberating hydrogen gas, as was previously expected.
Cobalt is already a common material in batteries and in high demand, so the Stanford team is hoping their new understanding of cobaltocene''s properties could help scientists develop other catalysts for this process. For example, the researchers are exploring more abundant, non-precious earth metal catalysts, such as iron, to make future LOHC systems more affordable and scalable.
"This is basic fundamental science, but we think we have a new strategy for more selectively storing electrical energy in liquid fuels," said Waymouth.
And for all the complicated and challenging work behind the scenes, the process, as summarized by Waymouth, is actually quite elegant: "When you have excess energy, and there''s no demand for it on the grid, you store it as isopropanol. When you need the energy, you can return it as electricity."
Additional Stanford co-authors are Conor Galvin, PhD ''23, and PhD student Julia Dressel. Waymouth is also a member of Stanford Bio-X and the Stanford Cancer Institute, a faculty fellow of Sarafan ChEM-H, and an affiliate of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.
This work was funded by the National Science Foundation.
The ‘liquid battery’ stores excess renewable energy as isopropanol, a liquid alcohol that serves as a high-density hydrogen carrier.
What could be called a major development in the renewable energy storage sphere, researchers at Stanford University have unveiled a novel technology that could transform how we harness and utilize clean energy.
Called the “liquid battery,” this innovative solution offers a promising answer to the intermittent nature of renewable sources like solar and wind power.
It paves the way for more sustainable and reliable energy grids, which are currently overwhelmingly reliant on lithium-ion technologies.
The research team, led by Robert Waymouth, the Robert Eckles Swain Professor in Chemistry, has developed a method to efficiently store hydrogen in a liquid form. This method overcomes the challenges of traditional hydrogen storage, which often involves bulky and complex infrastructure.
“We are developing a new strategy for selectively converting and long-term storing of electrical energy in liquid fuels,” said Waymouth, senior author of the study.
The team’s approach centers around liquid organic hydrogen carriers (LOHCs), chemical compounds capable of absorbing and releasing hydrogen.
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