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Battery Advance Could Lead To a Cleaner Way To Store Energy
sciencehabit writes: With the continuing rise of solar and wind power, the hunt is on for cheap batteries that are able to store large amounts of energy and deliver it when it's dark and the wind is still. Last year researchers reported an advance on one potentially cheap, energy-packing battery. But it required toxic and caustic materials. Now, the same team has revised its chemistry, doing away with the noxious constituents—an advance that could make future such batteries far cheaper and simpler to build.
Flow battery stores the energy in electrolytes in external tanks. Thus at some point we could have gas stations dispensing "charged" electrolytes making way for very rapid recharging.
As usual for any battery technology it works in the lab and the product is X+10 years away, where X is the current year.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Flow batteries aren't news, yet the words "flow battery" appear nowhere in the summary. This is an article about a flow battery. If you were expecting something new, this article isn't about that.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Does anyone know do flow batteries hold their charge well?
Depends on what the materials are. But unless the materials are inherently unstrable their separation into different storage tanks results in extremely low self-discharge. Very handy if you want to store utility-peaking levels of energy for months.
A more telling point is whether any leakage through the membrane to the other side degrades or poisons the reaction.
The latter is one reason Vanadium Redox flow batteries are so great. The simple compounds on each side of the membrane are the same (except for the oxidation state of the vanadium, and thus the number of its partners, such as oxygen atoms, it's associated with). As a result, any electrolyte that leaks into the wrong half-cell is quickly converted to that half-cell's electrolyte type. A little energy is lost "charging" it to the right oxidation state, but the battery is not poisoned. Unlike the one in the article.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I'm not sure about the US, but in the UK it's dark and windless for approximately 10% of the year.
Also, peak generating times don't always coincide with peak usage, so energy storage is necessary to even out the supply. And yes, while nuke plants can't spin up quickly enough to cover unexpected loads, they can be adjusted to fit expected loads (eg, at night to cover solar).
It's pretty much dark across the continental US for at least 8-10 hours per day, isn't it?
The wind may blow, but is it continuous at night everywhere it's dark? Is the wind speed high enough/predictable enough to totally offset the loss of 100% of solar capacity in aggregate?
In these places you have MORE wind at night, can you reliably transmit power to places that might have less wind at night, or at least that night?
In the UK no nuke plants load-follow, AFAIK, even though Sizewell B at least theoretically can.
Even in France I think that there is only a mean of ~25% load-following available (more for plants with more-recently-loaded fuel).
Rgds
Damon
http://m.earth.org.uk/
The saying is that the sun never sets over the British Empire, which was a lot bigger than the UK.
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