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Researchers have developed a water-based battery to store solar and wind energy
- lightedman 8y agoDon't we have better water-based power storage systems called reservoirs? Far many more 'recharge cycles' and there are some that operate by storing water pumped during times of excess energy generation and then releasing it back when needed during a peak demand.
- weaksauce 8y agoI wonder how safe this will be with hydrogen gas being a part of it. Sounds promising but you’d want it extra safe considering a mini Hindenburg would be attached to your house. Edit. I suppose I read it incorrectly as this is being invented for the utility scale.
- freeone3000 8y agoWe currently put high-temperature, charged lithium in our pants pockets. The technology this is replacing uses lead and sulfuric acid. Hydrogen is probably fine.
- gsich 8y agoIn case of problems you can remove your pants very quickly.
- Multicomp 8y agoSomething something new meaning to the safety dance
- jclulow 8y agoHave you seen how fast a lithium battery fire gets going?
- gsich 8y agoYes.
- zaarn 8y agoI doubt you can remove your pants faster than a lithium cell going skywards, especially since you'll be experience some quite decent panic at your pants being literally on fire.
- picsao 8y agoLevi's proudly present the smoke jumper pants. Protecting your Future Family with patented CTE Technology. (Controlled Trouser Explosion) Save your last pair of marbles.
- kbenson 8y agoWell, any vehicles you park in your garage or in your driveway probably have a lot of stored potential energy that can be released catastrophically under the wrong circumstances too. (this goes for whether it's ICE or electric). The fact that we generally consider those safe to sleep next to is a testament to safety engineering (and possibly a bit of self delusion).
- dbasedweeb 8y agoThe wrong circumstances required to catastrophically release all of that energy in an ICE car is pretty extreme, requiring the fuel to atomize and thoroughly mix with air. Otherwise you have a fire, not a bomb. Hydrogen by contrast just needs a spark and then it comes to strongly resemble a bomb. If your hydrogen is under pressure, then simple containment failure can be the “spark” required. Plus, gasoline is easy to store, while hydrogen tends to embrittle materials storing it. We shouldn’t short sell just how tricky hydrogen can be.
- kbenson 8y agoGasoline evaporates under most normal conditions when exposed to air. Fiel soaked rags have been known to spontaneously ignite in garages. I think what you're describing is the decades of safety advances we've had in ICE engine design that allow for safe fuel storage. I'm not trying to say that storing hydrogen is easy, I'm just saying that there's probably a significant amount of things we can do to bring the hazard level down, and there would be a real push for more work on those things if we were routinely using these units at our houses. That is, we would also view the proximity and operation of early model ICE engines to be too hazardous. We've come a long way since then.
- NegativeLatency 8y agoI was only aware of oil (not gas) soaked rags spontaneously combusting
- weaksauce 8y ago
- isoprophlex 8y agoWith adequate seals this is no more dangerous than existing chemical energy storage, such as gasoline and natural gas. The researchers state (in the paper itself) that they carefully control the charging voltage to avoid oxygen production in the same cell. Oxygen and hydrogen in the same device is dangerous, only hydrogen not so much.
- vvanders 8y agoUh, doesn't hydrogen have a history of leaking through most materials due to its small atomic size?
- lostapathy 8y agoAt which point it disperses very easily as it floats up. The key is just to keep it separate from pure oxygen, not keep it contained
- simonh 8y agoYes, but if you’re only storing it <24h to smooth out your daily power generation curve that shouldn’t be too much of a problem. It’s only really an issue if you’re storing it for weeks or more.
- taneq 8y agoYou're always storing some hydrogen even if the actual atoms are swapped out.
- simonh 8y agoOf course, but for short term storage the percentage loss should be small relative to other losses in the system. Lets say on each storage and recovery cycle over 24h I'm losing 10% of the stored energy from various losses each cycle, including 1% of the stored energy from Hydrogen loss. No big deal. Even though I'm losing 1% to hydrogen loss every 24h cycle, it's small relative to other losses per cycle. After many cycles it would still be a small fraction of overall losses. Conversely if my cycle time is 10 days for one storage and recovery cycle, at 1% hydrogen loss per 24h all of a sudden I'm now losing more from Hydrogen loss than all other losses combined. That's really bad.
- walshemj 8y agoOne of the major complaints when they trialed fuel cell buses in London years ago was that people though the fueling station would blow up ala hindenberg.
- jwilk 8y agoHindenburg
- haZard_OS 8y agoI worked on a similar system when I was finishing my degree. I suspect that, in the next 5-10 years, there will be several versions of this of various sizes ready for deployment.
- isoprophlex 8y agoThis is really brilliant. They cycle between two chemical species that are thermodynamically very stable in our atmosphere, solid MnO2 and Mn2+. This is very smart as a starting point because you don't need to worry about the electrodes slowly rusting away (compare: related work with exotic/expensive/unstable rare earth oxides) Also this redox couple charges at 1.6 V so oxygen production (which is bad in a cell that also evolves hydrogen) does not really happen (this takes 2.0 V or so) Really exciting stuff.
- raverbashing 8y agoMakes me wonder why they didn't think of this before or what challenges have they overcome this time.
- ByThyGrace 8y agoIt sounds too good to be true, right? Can't blame yourself for being skeptical so soon after the announcement.
- endymi0n 8y agoSometimes you just have to do something simple that just nobody else happened to have thought of before. Graphene and scotch tape comes to my mind...
- amelius 8y ago> Makes me wonder why they didn't think of this before Because a brute-force search is something only an IT professional can come up with.
- spodek 8y ago“I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.” ― Thomas A. Edison
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- josecyc 8y agoI don't know about this. Countless times researchers discover the next battery so much better than the current state-of-the-art being deployed, only to find out they just can't scale it. New battery technology is really hard.
- Animats 8y agoYes. Surface chemistry ("nanotechnology") seems to attract this sort of hype. "The prototype manganese-hydrogen battery, reported April 30 in Nature Energy, stands just three inches tall and generates a mere 20 milliwatt hours of electricity ... The researchers are confident they can scale up this table-top technology..." That is a really puny battery. It's 1/10th the energy capacity of a typical watch/hearing aid battery, which is about as small as you can buy retail. And it's 3 inches tall. So system energy density is currently something like 0.001 of commercial batteries. They should have scaled it up a bit more before turning on the hype machine. It's embarrassing to see this out of Stanford.
- TTPrograms 8y agoUtility scale batteries optimize for energy/$, not energy density or weight etc. Your comparisons are totally irrelevant.
- vanderZwan 8y agoOn that note, does anyone have any idea how it might compare to Peter Allen's open source Iron Battery project? I know the latter is in a very early stage, but maybe there is already a theoretical limit that can be predicted given the properties of manganese and iron. http://peterallenlab.com/ http://peterallenlab.com/ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-t9a7XVoH9lDJzhUF2nyHQ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-t9a7XVoH9lDJzhUF2nyHQ
- jlebrech 8y agoit's might be a really crappy battery, but having it use something that's virtually limitless and nearly free is a good way to go.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- svantana 8y ago>Cui estimated that, given the water-based battery’s expected lifespan, it would cost a penny to store enough electricity to power a 100-watt lightbulb for twelve hours. Oh dear, I hate university news "journalism" with a passion. For the life of me I cannot understand why they feel the need to dumb down parts of the content while other parts remain decidedly technical. Is it to have something that laymen can quote? In this example, it's not clear how long the storage would be, but presumably overnight? It would make much more sense to compare the expected price to existing solutions, and/or the current price of electricity.
- timb07 8y ago"Excess electrons bubbled off as hydrogen gas, thus storing that energy for future use." Just wow.
- konschubert 8y ago"To mimic how a wind or solar source might feed power into the battery, the researchers attached a power source to the prototype."
- DennisP 8y agoWell that'd be 1.2 kWh, stored for a penny. Average electricity price in the U.S. is 10 cents/kWh. I've often criticized people for ignoring the cost of storage when talking about wind/solar prices, but at a penny per kWh it's pretty insignificant.
- slededit 8y agoJudging by the quote that's the amortized price. That first kWh is going to be much more expensive.
- DennisP 8y agoAmortized price is what everybody uses, for every type of power plant. You get financing, and charge an amount that gives you a reasonable profit over the expected life of the plant. You don't charge extra at the beginning. Storage facilities are no different.
- 8bitsrule 8y ago"the researchers are confident they can scale up this table-top technology to an industrial-grade system" Oh dear.
- konschubert 8y ago> To mimic how a wind or solar source might feed power into the battery, the researchers attached a power source to the prototype. So, they charged the battery? Why doesn't the article just say that? Does the intended audience of the article not know what "charging a battery" is?
- thefifthsetpin 8y agoMy guess is that the researchers designed their power source to mimic the behavior of solar and wind farms. The researchers were probably rather specific about these behaviors, but it was too verbose or technical for a news article. Some editor tried to summarize that part of the paper, and that editor failed which is how we got this ridiculous sentence.
- fernly 8y agoCould someone ELI5 how the recharge cycle works? On charging it evolves H2 gas; how does that get put back on recharge? This is very much NOT explained by the paragraph, > The researchers did this by re-attaching their power source to the depleted prototype, this time with the goal of inducing the manganese dioxide particles clinging to the electrode to combine with water, replenishing the manganese sulfate salt. Once this salt was restored, incoming electrons became surplus, and excess power could bubble off as hydrogen gas, in a process that can be repeated again and again and again.
- ecma 8y agoThis puzzled me also. Perhaps it's been kicked down the road as an engineering problem and we'd end up with a hydrogen extraction system which is responsible for that part. We'd probably need to feed protons back in though...
- hedora 8y agoIn the modern sense of the word, this is not a battery. It is a device that cracks water into hydrogen, which can then be fed into a fuel cell. Presumably, it consumes distilled water, which is why it is targeting utility scale storage and not home installations. The work sounds interesting, but the article is painfully written. Lead acid batteries produce hydrogen too. I think the insight is that this can’t produce electricity directly, so the chemistry can be much more stable.
- picsao 8y agoSo this approach has all the irks of hydrogen storage?
- fernly 8y ago> ...not a battery. The paper, linked below (thanks xelxebar) would beg to differ, it says > we report a rechargeable manganese–hydrogen battery, where the cathode is cycled between soluble Mn2+ and solid MnO2 with a two-electron reaction, and the anode is cycled between H2 gas and H2O through well-known catalytic reactions of hydrogen evolution and oxidation. They give an equation for the cell operation as, Mn2+ + 2H2O ↔ MnO2 + 2H+ + H2 Let me try that with _sub_ and ^sup^, does HN support that? Mn2^+^ + 2H_2_O ↔ MnO_2_ + 2H^+^ + H_2_ Anyway, that double-ended arrow says that you can read it from right to left, i.e. evolved H_2_ gets back into (or stays in?) the solution to react with the O_2_ from the magnesium oxide to make water. Quote, > During discharge of the battery, the uniform layer of as-deposited MnO2 on the cathode is dissolved back to soluble Mn2+ electrolyte and H2 is oxidized on the anode. So, I guess it stays in solution...?
- apsec112 8y agoUnfortunately, history shows that new battery chemistries are a dime a dozen. It's commercialization and manufacturing at scale that's the real bottleneck. Look at what happened to Aquion, which raised $190 million for their salt water battery: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/Aquion-the-Bill-Gates-and-Kleiner-Perkins-Funded-Advanced-Battery-Startup#gs.AJ5cTbs https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/Aquion-the-Bill...
- wpietri 8y agoOuch. And they later sold for $9.2 million. I sure have some questions about what they spent the money on.
- simonh 8y agoResearch and development, and building out manufacturing infrastructure for something nobody wanted. Looks like they were killed by the falling costs of Lithium Ion. If you plan to be 50% cheaper than Li in 4 years and then 3 years in Li costs have halved, you’re in trouble.
- EdCoffey 8y agoThere's some more detail on the construction, and what becomes of the hydrogen (it will be stored in large pressurized steel tanks) here: https://cen.acs.org/energy/energy-storage-/New-battery-serve-grid/96/web/2018/05 https://cen.acs.org/energy/energy-storage-/New-battery-serve...
- tzahola 8y agoK...Keep me posted! I’ve learned not to get too excited by battery research. It was all vaporware in the past 20 years.
- Tepix 8y ago> it would cost a penny to store enough electricity to power a 100-watt lightbulb for twelve hours Ha, 100 watt lightbulbs do not exist! /s
- protomyth 8y agoThey still do because some folks need to heat/light the chicken coop or compressor. /s not withstanding
- Tepix 8y agoGiven that this battery stores energy as H2, doesn't Hydrogen tend to diffuse and escape from the battery after a while?
- d--b 8y agoCan anyone comment about the size of these? How much hydrogen do you need to store a KWh? And how much manganese solution do you need?
- leibnizwasright 8y agoEven though this uses Hydrogen, which means small quantity of water, water still a finite resource, it becomes costly every year, specially the one that's drinkable. This seems like a double sword, solving one side, while it makes other worse.
- programbreeding 8y agoDoes this require potable water though?
- leibnizwasright 8y agoIt does not say if requires potable water or how much of it would be necessary for big batteries. But I imagine potable water would serve for optimal reactions.
- Tade0 8y agoSound great, but somebody else might have already stolen their lunch: https://eosenergystorage.com/ https://eosenergystorage.com/ This product is, of course, more expensive but at least it's already being deployed.
- lm2s 8y agoUnrelated: this reminds me of the “2-tier” water dams that also store energy in the form of water from whatever production source connected to them.
- syntaxing 8y agoI was always under the impression that water has an extremely low energy density (in 2H2 + O2 form) relative to existing technology?
- picsao 8y agoI have a question on hydrogen tanks and hydrogen brittle Ness. Could a approach similar to the stomache mucus lining be used to migrate the hydrogen insertion?