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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)
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.
My first immediate thought on this is I think this will work well on our space colonies on Mars. There will be no infrastructure so we can just setup one of these modules in each colony and have always available electricity.
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.
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 have positively identified some solid niche markets.
I guess *maybe* the integrated manufacturing combined with less wiring for installers *might* come out ahead on the price tag?
Someone had to do it.
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..
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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 in 1980, after 40 years of development. They are now up to 44%, and solar cells on the market at consumer products right now hit 21.5%. If you charge a lead acid battery from that cell its efficiency is only 18.3%, and with less stellar products (many are in the 15-17% range) this device already beats them in combination with lead-acid.
That's why you research new technologies (yes, an integrated solar flow battery is a new technology), to improve them. You don't get an optimized system right off the bat. This isn't a commercially viable system yet, but was not intended to be. But it is already in the commercially viable efficiency range.
You need lots of research like this, attacking the problem from many different directions, to discovery what is possible, and the best solutions for different problems.
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