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Scientists “bottle the sun” with a liquid battery that stores solar energy
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- euroderf 5mo agoThis sounds like an explosive breakthrough.
- metalman 5mo agobang. there are a huge number of things that can store energy, chemicaly ,and reversibly, but the gotchas are always lurking, exotic wildly expensive ingedients, dangerous failure modes , or very complicated operational requirements that will not scale into the real world. this anouncent makes clear that is is based on dna, which is no surprise as nature is the ancient master of chemical energy storage,and which all of us useing right now anyway
- ____tom____ 5mo ago"When exposed to a trigger -- such as a small amount of heat or a catalyst -- the molecule snaps back into its original form, releasing the stored energy as heat." That's a bit concerning. Runaway waiting to happen.
- rigonkulous 5mo agoIt sure would be nice to see some way to harness all this energy falling around us. I'd far prefer to just catch a few rays to charge my toys than plug into some far distant machine. I remember thinking, in my youth, that the technology that enabled CASIO calculation would one day be applied as well to a bigger Turing machine, but I'm yet to see a solar-powered computer. I sure wish it'd happen, though. All these magic solar energy storage/conversion systems need to start showing up on SOM/SOC's, imho ..
- micromacrofoot 5mo agoyou still need too much surface area and too much storage to generate the amount of power needed absent of a major breakthrough solar will always be a house/grid level technology, which is fine and works at scale
- nickpeterson 5mo agoI think I saw an apple A16 takes about 8 watts, which would be about a square foot of solar panel. So assuming we keep making progress it doesn’t seem insane to me that a laptop where the back of the lcd is a solar panel would be enough?
- blacksmith_tb 5mo agoAngle though isn't ideal, unless the PV panel pops off the lid so you can position it better (and still be able to open the screen far enough back to read - though that's often not great in bright sun). I remember the OLPC could be run by hoisting a bucket of sand or water up on a rope and pulley on a tree branch and letting it drive a small generator as that came back down - and that was almost 20yr ago).
- micromacrofoot 5mo agothe mild inconvenience of needing to be in direct sun for N hours always overshadows this you need a massive efficiency improvement to overcome this we're still in the calculators and tv remotes level of on-device solar
- Rekindle8090 5mo ago[dead]
- blacksmith_tb 5mo agoSure, so a solar-only laptop is not practical, but generating the power in its battery on your roof is a solved problem. This MOST process doesn't immediately look like it has home-scale applications (maybe in cold climates), but for heat to make steam, promising.
- vessenes 5mo agoNot clear from the very fluffy press release how one gets this pyrimidone to start releasing enough energy to boil water while it maintains 60% better energy density than lithium ion batteries. I’d personally want to understand that before making any big plans, but this sounds cool.
- flopsamjetsam 5mo agoYeah, you'd think they'd include that. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aec6413 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aec6413 "Upon treatment with acid, that bond breaks to release more than a megajoule per kilogram of the compound, enough to rapidly boil water from a solution." That's from the editor's summary (I haven't had time to read the paper).
- kenhwang 5mo agoFrom the article: > When exposed to a trigger -- such as a small amount of heat or a catalyst -- the molecule snaps back into its original form, releasing the stored energy as heat. From the paper abstract, the catalyst is HCl. I don't have access to the full paper, so I don't know how they separate the HCl from the MOST to neutralize it to be rechargeable again.
- kadoban 5mo ago"A small amount of heat or a catalyst". Well, that sounds unstable. So any random contamination and you have a runaway reaction.
- kenhwang 5mo agoFrom what I've seen of the paper, it seems like the catalyst is needed for a full energy release reaction. Regular batteries also have rapid energy release with unintended contamination of a chemical (water), and we still generally have no problems during regular usage. The reaction triggered by heat doesn't release all the stored energy, which would be the bigger concern for unintended runaway reactions.
- DoctorOetker 5mo agoalso see: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aec6413 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aec6413
- AndrewDucker 5mo agoStores it for return as heat. Which is useful, but not nearly as useful as returning it as electricity would be. Still, if it could be stored stably in the summer and converted to heat in the winter then possibly helpful. I wonder how the efficiencies compare to producing hydrogen or other burnable gases.
- hn_throwaway_99 5mo ago> Still, if it could be stored stably in the summer and converted to heat in the winter then possibly helpful. There are already sand batteries that store heat well and are used in northern climates: https://polarnightenergy.com/news/worlds-largest-sand-battery-now-in-operation/ https://polarnightenergy.com/news/worlds-largest-sand-batter...
- pfdietz 5mo agoThese are too expensive for seasonal storage.
- hn_throwaway_99 5mo ago"Seasonal storage" is a problem so far out that it feels like it's not even worth worrying about until renewables are a much higher percentage of the overall energy mix. What I mean by this is that even places that (for example) have a huge abundance of solar power during the day still have to burn fossil fuels when it's nighttime or when it's cloudy - solving the "24 hour problem" will still take a lot more renewable capacity than we currently have. And even then, we already have the ability to create synthetic fuels from electricity, so any new development would need to be competitive with what we can already do.
- pfdietz 5mo agoI disagree! It's a vital problem to solve, especially if solar becomes significantly cheaper than wind (as appears to be happening; solar has the better experience rate). And solving it punctures one of the last arguments bad-faith nuclear advocates use to argue against renewables. I will once again point to Austin Vernon and Standard Thermal, which has an approach that could truly solve the problem. The first principles analysis of the issue shows the problem with "sand batteries" and the like. https://www.orcasciences.com/articles/standard-thermal https://www.orcasciences.com/articles/standard-thermal "Given that heat capacities of solids are all generally similar at ~3kb per atom, we’d need to store heat in a solid that costs ~$10-30/ton or less and tolerates very high temps. But nothing built on a foundation or made in a factory is sold for less than $100/ton. There’s almost nothing that even gets shipped in the dollar per ton range." https://www.austinvernon.site/blog/standardthermal.html https://www.austinvernon.site/blog/standardthermal.html https://www.standardthermal.com/ https://www.standardthermal.com/
- CrzyLngPwd 5mo agoTrees also store the sun, and can release it back as heat. Blackberries store the sun too, and later release it as wine or jam :)
- DoctorOetker 5mo agothe charging is supposed to happen in plain sunlight in "UV collectors", or is renewable energy envisioned to power UV lamps / LEDs?
- Danox 5mo agoGood news in trying times good work researchers at UC Santa Barbara education and hard work still pay off there is hope I was starting to wonder…
- adrian_b 5mo agoNeither the press release nor the research paper abstract provide the only number that matters: the energy efficiency. The energy stored per mass has little importance for a stationary system. What matters is the energy loss when the solar energy is stored into this chemical compound, instead of being converted directly by photovoltaic cells. There are 2 losses, before storage only a part of the incoming solar energy is eventually stored into chemical bonds, the rest being either converted into heat or not absorbed. The second loss is when the energy is recovered. As it seems that the temperature that can be attained when extracting the stored energy is very low, the efficiency of conversion into other forms of energy will also be very low. In the absence of more precise information, this does not seem competitive with synthesizing hydrocarbons for long term energy storage, either in energy efficiency or in energy density, but only in the initial cost of the equipment, which is true only for now, as the living beings prove that synthesizing hydrocarbons from hydrogen generated with solar energy could be done at a very low cost. Because of the inherent very low efficiency of using this to generate electrical energy, the abstract of the research paper suggests as possible uses only "on-demand heat delivery for water heating, cooking, and surface defrosting". This may be useful, but far more useful is to use another method of energy storage that can be used for anything, not only for such limited applications. For myself, such a solution could provide only warm water for washing. For cooking, I would want my microwave oven, and I would also want my computers to work, so it would not make sense to invest in such a thing, instead of in a battery that could cover all my energy needs. Only if the energy efficiency from the incoming solar energy into the heat used to make hot water were significantly greater than when passing through photovoltaic cells and a battery, such a system could be useful to provide heating and warm water to a building, allowing for smaller batteries to cover the other energy consumption.
- ninalanyon 5mo agoEnergy efficiency is far from the only number that matters. Unless you are that rare person who is talking about total life time cost in energy terms. You have to consider the cost of manufacturing, the cost of disposal, the cost of maintenance, possible externalities such as pollution of the environment, etc.
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- Markoff 5mo agoand here I am thinking this will be about Moser bottle lamps https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23536914 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23536914