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Metal-Free 'Rhubarb' Battery Could Store Renewable Grid Energy
sciencehabit writes "A molecule nearly identical to one in rhubarb may hold the key to the future of renewable energy. Researchers have used the compound to create a high-performance 'flow' battery, a leading contender for storing renewable power in the electric utility grid. If the battery prototype can be scaled up, it could help utilities deliver renewable energy when the wind is calm and the sun isn't shining."
Abstract.
Just had to say it. Gotta love PHC!
BS clickbait title.
It ran outta juice!
is gonna love this.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
If I lost 100 lbs and got $100k in plastic surgery I could maybe be a model too!
That is a shame. I wish it could store non-renewable energy too...
"Wow - a rhubarb pie? For me? Let me carve out a slice right now!"
"BZZZZERK!"
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Laugh more like if it can get past the energy industry trying to squash renewables:
One example: http://cleantechnica.com/2013/03/06/missouri-could-squash-economic-development-from-renewable-energy-in-the-state/
Which indicates to me that solar and other renewables are becoming feasible and economic.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
The summary implies that this technology could be used for large-scale power, but I wonder what the storage density is.
Specifically I wonder how this compares to liquid metal batteries. If everything Professor Sadoway says about the liquid metal batteries is true, those really will provide grid-level storage of power.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Wouldn't surprise me.
That stuff is extremely sour!
It's like eating pure H+
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
It's a flow battery, not a 'flow' battery.
Or possibly a flow 'battery', considering the experimental setup had only one cell.
Of course any attempt to store NON-Renewable energy will invalidate the warranty,
...and Custard!
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
I doubt the utilities would like this, but for the average home dweller with solar panels it would be useful.
Or we could use the battery in cars, so that while we charge our car in it's garage, when the sun goes down, it can power the house back the other way.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
I get it. They're going to take this battery and stick it where the sun don't shine.
I think the best they come up with for a flow battery is Zinc-cerium. And it has a quarter of the storage density of a lead acid battery, and isn't really even comparable to a lithium-ion's storage density.
The biggest problem with flow batteries, is their one advantage of separating the energy storage and the energy production is done better by things we use now such as burning coal to power a steam turbine, nuclear power (again steam turbine), or even petrol in a combustion generator. All of which have insanely higher energy density and use the same "renewalable" model a flow battery does.
Never rub another man's rhubarb.
EETimes has a more useful article. This is more like a reversible fuel cell. The working fluid is pumped through the cell, where a chemical reaction occurs. The process is reversible. So there's a "charged" fuel tank, a "discharged" fuel tank, pumps, and plumbing. No info yet on the energy density of the "charged" fuel tank, which is the big question.
In the galvanic direction, peak power densities were 0.246Wcm2 and 0.600W cm2 at these same SOCs, respectively (Fig. 1c). To avoid significant water splitting in the electrolytic direction, we used a cut-off voltage of 1.5V, at which point the current densities observed at 10% and 90% SOCs were 2.25 A cm2 and 0.95Acm2, respectively, with corresponding power densities of 3.342Wcm2 and 1.414Wcm2. ...
The galvanic discharge capacity retention (that is, the number of coulombs extracted in one cycle divided by the number of coulombs extracted in the previous cycle) is above 99%, indicating the battery is capable of operating with minimal capacity fade and suggesting that current efficiencies are actually closer to 99%. ...
AQDS has an aqueous solubility greater than 1M at pH 0, and the quinone solution can thus be stored at relatively high energy density—volumetric and gravimetric energy densities exceed 50Whl1 and 50Whkg1, respectively. ...
As shown in Fig. 2, current efficiency starts at about 92% and climbs to about 95% over ~15 standard cycles. Note that these measurements are done near viable operating current densities for a battery of this kind. Because of this, we believe this number places an upper bound on the irreversible losses in the cell. In any case, 95% is comparable to values seen for other battery systems.
I'm not an expert in any applicable field, but as I have institutional access to the original paper, I scanned it to find what looked to me like relevant numbers. As I interpret the above:
It generates about 0.5W cm^-2 of membrane, so you'd need 2m^2 to get 1 kW output. (But presumably this can be in some compact folded/layered configuration.)
It can charge much faster than it discharges: that 2m^2 of membrane would let you charge at about 4kW.
The storage capacity of the battery fades at less than 1% per charge/discharge cycle.
One litre of reactants lets you store 50Wh of energy (i.e. 20kg for a kilowatt hour)
I think the last paragraph is saying that, neglecting pumping costs, it returns about 95% of the energy you put into it.
Note that we can expect these numbers to improve with further research, but whether there are big improvements to come or only minor ones I couldn't say.
Also: They use a two-reactant-tank set up rather than four tanks, so each tank holds a mixture of the 'charged' and 'discharged' forms of its reactants (e.g. one tank holds a mixture of Br2 and HBr.) I'd naively expected a four tank set up.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Is this what passes for science reporting... "A molecule nearly identical".
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
... why not scale it down. There's a real need for batteries right now that have higher energy density, particularly with today's portable communication devices.
It's about storing a large amount of energy in a very large amount of electrolyte without similarly large plates and electrical connections. For power storage they are thinking in terms of batteries the size of buildings, perhaps built like current sewerage-treatment plants, to store energy in the electrolyte and move it along, bringing it back to the electrical assembly with pumps as needed. It can be considerably less energy-dense than current batteries in pounds per erg and still be far more practical for the kind of large-scale storage the tech is aimed at.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
For grid storage your battery will be a building. It can be as large as necessary; it's the price of the infrastructure and reactant to store and re-create enough energy to get the solar farm past a rainy day which are limits.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
I'm going to start demanding a nickle in response to every press release announcing a new miracle battery technology.
I figure that will let me retire in about 18 months.
G.
src:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lewis-milford/natural-gas-loses-to-sola_b_4556162.html
And how many charge/discharge cycle that "rhubarb battery" can handle ?
What are the benefits this "rhubarb battery" has over the ultra-capacitors which can handle huge number of rapid charge/discharge cycles ?
See the comment I posted back in 2012 regarding ultra-capacitors @ http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3143769&cid=41458249
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Yeah, I'm not sure I'm ready to have cost issued decided by a judge.
In what may be the first time a U.S. solar power project has been declared cost-competitive against natural gas in a competitive bidding process, a judge has said solar is cheaper than natural gas. The ruling could be a road map for avoiding a new fossil fuel age dominated by big natural gas.
He can declare all he wants. When it comes to the issue of cost, a legal jurist is seriously outside his area of competence. Solar in Minnesota is asinine. I lived there for may years.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
The difference is that a battery can hold a useful amount of energy.
As a rough guideline, 1 amp hour ~= 10,000 farads.
That's the capacity of a large ultra capacitor or a AAA battery. You don't power a city with those. You can, use them to power your SSD for four seconds in case of a power outage so it can finish writing the data.
Isn't anyone concerned that one of the reactants is a halogen?
if you are done with it it makes a tastey pie
When I was a kid I ate large amounts of rhubarb, rhubarb pie, cobbler, etc. Definitely created high performance flow issues, involving interfacing with utilities by, uh, sitting on the can.
Water and hydrogen peroxide are also pretty damn close. H2O, H2O2. How much difference could an additional hydrogen atom make?
My company already makes a zinc-bromide flow battery that's on the market. Going to make a 500kW version soon. It also has an advanced power management eco-system it "lives" in, It uses zinc and bromine. And we all know that zinc is super expensive because its a metal - right?
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ZBB www.zbbenergy.com
I used to be a big advocate of the idea of having big batteries to store electricity from unreliable and "green" energy like wind and solar. That was until the cost of wind and solar power really sunk in. Wind power is on about par with peak energy generation like natural gas turbines, which is somewhere between 2x and 3x the cost of typical base load power like coal and nuclear. Solar power is so expensive, and variable (based on location, weather, usage, etc.) that it boggles my mind that any utility would even consider it. Then I recall all the subsidies from tax money spent on this nonsense that it starts to make sense to me again.
The cost of the wind and solar power is high enough that adding to the cost with storage has got to mean the total cost to the utility, and therefore the customer, would be something like 4x what coal and nuclear would cost. Then the size of these batteries would have to be astronomical.
One thing that concerns me is the environmental impact these batteries would have. The materials for the batteries would have to come from somewhere. I assume they would have to be mined out of the ground. These batteries would have to be manufactured, transported, etc. The carbon footprint of pouring the concrete pad these would most likely have to sit upon would have to be quite large.
Another question of environmental impact is, what if there is a leak? The stuff used in the batteries may have been derived from plant material but too much of anything can be bad. I grew up on a farm, I saw what too much water can do. I also saw what too much fertilizer can do, it burns the crops almost as if it was set on fire. What will the liquids in this battery do to crops and water supplies if there is an accidental release?
At least with nuclear power any radioactivity will decay away, with a chemical spill that stuff will always be there. I would much rather see someone come up with a technology to make the production of ammonia cheaper and not rely on natural gas. Ammonia is a fertilizer, a naturally occurring substance, and a fuel. An ammonia leak would still be an asphyxiation hazard, a fire hazard, could burn crops, and could pollute a water supply. However, ammonia is a gas that breaks down into nitrogen and water in the air. The stuff they use in this battery contains bromine and sulfur, what would that do to the water table?
No thanks, I'll take nuclear power instead.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
I find as I get older that I am demanding more and more from the articles that I read. In this case, I have rhubarb growing in my backyard (when it grows, its winter where I live and the roots of the rhubarb plant are underground and the ground has about 3 feet of snow on top of it). But it grows every year and needs very little in the way of fertilizer or water, and grows to about 5 feet in diameter. The old house next door went down a few years ago and the new one that replaced it is huge. Between my house and the house next door is now a bit of a wind tunnel. I have built a generator with extremely powerful Chinese magnets, and mounted it on a set of bicycle rims that have a piece of canvas acting like a turbine. On an average day I can generate about a dozen kW of power from this thing. I normally run the computer for about 12 hours a day. Storing power in a battery could eliminate the power I use to run the computer (charge all night, then run on what is being generated and what is in storage during the day). If I have to replace the rhubarb electrolyte every year, that's fine. But... getting to my initial complaint, this is /. and not hack-a-day and they are massively scarce on details of the build. Its interesting, and nice. Call me with a take away.
Meanwhile solar is in use at Dome A in Antarctica!
The people who set it up just attached the panels vertically on poles.
Minnesota is tropical in comparison.
No you won't, because the banks and governments will not touch it and the energy utilities don't have enough ready cash to do it alone.
The lesson that should have been learnt after TMI of lots of small reactors didn't happen so the price per reactor is still far too high for it to happen without vast amounts of capital.
Also the nuclear lobby ate it's own children by lobbying against such small reactors and thorium research. Unless something comes out of India or China does something original civilian nuclear is going nowhere.
So even though enormous nuclear plants of a new design could theoretically come in cheap per MW/h over their lifetime it's not happening because the price of entry is too high for anyone to be interested.
Thus at this point the other alternative energies, such as solar and wind, are far more relevant than nuclear.
You are asking for the wrong figure of merit. What is the importance of storage density for a stationary battery which is supposed to smoothen out the demand peaks in an electric grid?
The important figure of merit here is price per kWh of storage. If you insist you can take an inverse of this number and call it energy density per dollar.
Numerous technologies have been proposed to store excess renewable energy for later use. And many regions already pump water uphill and later run it through a generator to do just that. But that doesn’t work in the flatlands.
Todays line of thinking about reversible hydroelectric power is like ancient ideas about water supplying infrastructure (Roman aqueducts): "water can only flow on its own if it is downhill".
You can pump water under high pressure into the underground cavity and then release it back to recover energy, it is the same principle as with conventional hydro power where you assure high hydrostatic pressure by piling water mass behind a tall dam. The turbines don't give a damn for what the source of the pressure is. Moreover, using a column of earth instead of a water column to achieve same pressure means you need less land area for that. You can think of this one as of an reversible Artesian well. And since the turnover time is typically short (for photovoltaics it is basically a day/night cycle), you even don't need much water capacity either - a small system could consist of an expandable steel tank under a concrete weight and an outflow collecting pool. And of course, the turbines and pumps.
Quantum Apostrophe, is that you? Go back to trolling FARK.
If it loses 1% of its capacity every time its charged then charging daily with your solar panels will leave you with just 3% capacity after 365 days/charging cycles?
So I guess you will have to have it refueled every six months or so. Which starts to sound sort of closer to the economics of heating fuel in a tank...
I hope I am misunderstanding as a 100kw/h battery for $3000 dollars would revolutionize the economics of solar power for most households with a large enough basement/shed to put it in.
[youtube] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3WF-5-o2KA
That's not false, but remember it's completely intentional. A well built network is overprovisioned, as /. readers know from personal experience, but the power grid is not currently well built because of Reaganista cost-cutting and profit-maximizing being prioritized over continual upgrade, expansion and maintenance. From 1988 to 1998 demand grew by 30%, while transmission grew by only 15%; from 1999 to 2009 demand grew by 20% and transmission by only 3%. My local energy provider stopped doing any line maintenance for five years straight - and only restarted two years ago because the annual cost of repairs from fallen limbs had significantly exceeded (by 2x according to their annual report) the cost of maintenance. The current business climate is intentionally shortchanging the future, because the consequences of this are easy to monetize. Energy shortages are a desired end goal, as demonstrated by the intentional bottlenecking of path 15 during the fake California energy crisis that everyone blames Enron for (in reality, that situation was created by a vortex of Democrat incompetence, Republican chicanery, and Big Business sociopathy, and Ken Lay was a sacrificial goat).
It's been empirically proven that adding residential solar increases the capacity and reliability of the grid, but only up to a point. Generation of power closer to points of use and across a distributed network decreases (but does not eliminate) the need for huge, costly transmission lines. Guerilla solar has existed for decades, of course, and you may be using power your next-door neighbor illegally placed on the grid right now. Modern non-islanding grid-tie inverters make this a safe and commonplace practice. Saturation is only really possible when you've discontinued hundred-year-old expansion and upkeep plans and defanged public watchdogs through electoral manipulation (such as secret campaign contributions) and political action (such as PAC funding).
It's cheaper and more profitable to break the system in order to maintain central control than it is to return to the days of utility expansionism and empower distributed production. It's the usual hoary old "socialize risk and privatize profits" strategy; the super-rich power producers inevitably win, just by failing to improve the grid in the name of cost management. Don't think Washington doesn't know this!
Yes. Although the need for the overhaul was exhaustively researched and documented before Jimmy Carter left office, the result of those analyses has been that power generators and service providers have vastly increased the resources they devote to political subornation and regulatory capture, in order to avoid building a system that is beneficial to the human race, because it would make their leadership part of the top 20% middle class instead of part of the top 1% jet set.
Exactly. They've built an excuse to do what is the worst possible thing for the human race and for our social and cultu
sure it is easy to remove the http://beta. on the addressbar
but then next day it is there for one article again, it is highly irritating.
Why does this happen and how can I disable "beta" permanently?