Interesting idea for very large increase in battery capacity

[Angilion]

Note "idea". I'm not an advocate or a press writer, so I'm not going to be portraying this as something that will inevitably happen very soon and make everywhere 100% renewable energy generation for 0.0000001p per KWh and electric cars with 1000 mile range that charge in 30 seconds at a cost of four pence.

But it is an interesting idea and it has passed peer review in a journal and an early experimental prototype has been built and does work.

The summary is that it allows at a viable cost a two-part battery with the energy stored in chemicals held seperately from the section that converts it back to electricity. So you can scale the storage up by having bigger tanks for the chemicals, which potentially makes bulk electricity storage possible. Since the chemicals are cheap, it's practical to fill huge tanks and store significant amounts of electricity. That would do a great deal to increase the efficiency of electricity generation and it would greatly reduce two of the biggest problems with renewables (lack of predictability and lack of control). Feed the grid from the battery as required, feed the battery from the renewable generation as and when possible - you don't need to continuously match generation to demand.

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2014/01/renewable-energy-breakthrough/

 

[Selekt0r]

Interesting development. Frankly, anything which could provide part of the long-term solution to reducing reliance on fossil fuels and decreasing the cost of renewables has to be welcomed.

 

[dirtychinchilla]

I must say, I haven't read the whole article, although it does sound interesting, but it also seems like the kind of idea that battery manufacturers would try and force under the carpet to prevent their sales being hit.

 

[DAnDan]

I must say, I haven't read the whole article, although it does sound interesting, but it also seems like the kind of idea that battery manufacturers would try and force under the carpet to prevent their sales being hit.

Flow batteries of varying sorts have been around for a long time, and are in research in a lot of different forms in a lot of different areas. It's a multinational area of research, so would be quite difficult to be swept under the carpet now.

How much use they actually get is an unknown though, there's still quite a lot of issues with most of them .

 

[ChroniC]

Aren't Hydrogen fuel cells already a better solution to the problem. I read that they are almost viable now

 

[DAnDan]

Aren't Hydrogen fuel cells already a better solution to the problem. I read that they are almost viable now

Very different takes on the task, with their own problems as well. For large scale storage like described in the article, they'd have a lot of their own complications, which could make them a lot worse to use. A lot of the work into them is focusing on different areas.

 

[Haggisman]

So if I'm reading it right:

You have 2 tanks of chemicals, and a mixing tank/battery.

When there is more demand than supply, the chemicals are mixed which generates electricity.
When there is more supply than demand, the surplus electricity separates the chemicals back into the tanks?

 

[rubberduck]

I must say, I haven't read the whole article, although it does sound interesting, but it also seems like the kind of idea that battery manufacturers would try and force under the carpet to prevent their sales being hit.

Its a completely different technology to batteries for consumer devices or electrical cars etc. and thus will have a different application. Essentially solar, wind-turbines etc. can generate decent amounts of electricity but not always when it is needed. Indeed, if it is really sunny why would people have their lights/heating on? Currently there is no way for the large amounts of energy generated when it is really sunny/windy etc. to be stored so it is lost if not used. These large scale batteries would allow the storage of massive amounts of energy which could then be trickled in to the grid at times of high demand.

Alternatively a house could its own flow-battery and a wind-turbine, solar-array. During the day the flow-battery could be charged and when people come home from work it could be used to power the heating lights, hot-water etc. over the course of the next 12 hours etc.

 

[Angilion]

I must say, I haven't read the whole article, although it does sound interesting, but it also seems like the kind of idea that battery manufacturers would try and force under the carpet to prevent their sales being hit.

I think it wouldn't because;

1) It doesn't stop battery manufacturers from manufacturing their own batteries of this type. In fact, they would need to be manufactured - this is a research project, not a manufacturing facility.

2) There's not much overlap with existing batteries anyway because this is for bulk electricity storage, which doesn't really exist at the moment. It doesn't have much application in the main areas of battery use today, so it wouldn't impinge on the existing market very much. Nobody is going to want to buy a phone with a sizable fuel tank attached to it, even if it does mean they could go 100 hours between charging.

3) It's far too public to be swept under the carpet. The basic idea of flow batteries is already known (the big deal about this one is the huge reduction in the cost of the materials used in the storage, which would be necessary to make flow batteries viable) and this one has been published in a major publically available journal.

 

[Angilion]

Aren't Hydrogen fuel cells already a better solution to the problem. I read that they are almost viable now

They're more expensive. A lot more, and inherently so because of the materials used and the complexity of manufacturing.

They require pure hydrogen, which is expensive to make and both expensive and difficult to store.

To serve as storage for the output of a power station, you'd have to use the output of the power station to generate hydrogen from water by electrolysis, then store the hydrogen, then run it through a fuel cell to generate electricity to serve the grid on demand. Every stage would be lossy (the first stage very much so) and expensive.

So for this specific application, a cheap flow battery would be a much better solution.

 

[Spangles]

If your having battery problems I feel bad for you son, I got 99 problems but battery life aint one!

 

[PlacidCasual]

National Power had a contract with the National Grid to build a industrial sized flow battery storage facility at Little Barford power station in the early noughties. The technology was called Regenysys but significant problems in construction sank the project.