Researchers have developed a water-based battery to store solar and wind energy
news.stanford.edu
news.stanford.edu
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.
Because a brute-force search is something only an IT professional can come up with.
The most lasting contribution Edison made to the light bulb was the screw-in base, with one contact at the bottom and the other in the shell. But even then, there were a lot of alternative designs, as Edison was a real ass when it came to licensing.
But he didn't brute-force far enough to develop the tungsten filament, did he?
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.
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.
Just wow.
"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.
Your comparisons are totally irrelevant.
Granted, investments in atomic energy eliminates a lot of the need for storage...
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.
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.
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
Mn2^+^ + 2H_2_O ↔ MnO_2_ + 2H^+^ + H_2_
> 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...?
Mn₂⁺ + 2H₂O ⇌ MnO₂ + 2H⁺ + H₂
(Shameless plug: I generated the above with https://github.com/jwilk/chemiscripts .)
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-018-0147-7
which redirects to the Nature Energy page and so is behind a paywall. I'm not sure how Sci-Hub is viewed here, but this links directly to the pdf:
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?
Oh dear.
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/Aquion-the-Bill...
I’ve learned not to get too excited by battery research. It was all vaporware in the past 20 years.
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).
We shouldn’t short sell just how tricky hydrogen can be.
If the pressure is high enough[1], you don't even need to ignite the hydrogen; pressurized gas storage experiencing catastrophic failure is a bomb. An explosion is rapidly expanding gas. Normally a chemical chain reaction[2] is used to generate that gas, but rupturing high pressure gas storage has very similar effects.
Storing a lot of energy in a small space (high energy density) always includes the risk of that energy being released.
> We shouldn’t short sell just how tricky hydrogen can be.
Working with hydrogen directly is really problematic. However, an easy way to solves most of those problems is stabilizing the hydrogen by attaching it to a chain of carbon atoms.
[1] The storage pressure probably is high enough or the design would have used much cheaper low pressure parts.
[2] e.g. the common high explosives that store lots of single-bonded nitrogen as a solid and rapidly chain react into triple-bonded N2 gas and a lot of energy
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.
Yes, gasoline will burn easily can auto-ignite in common household conditions. I've had the "fun" of running for the garden hose after a roommate made a similar mistake with paper towels soaked with some type of cleaning solution and wiped up engine oil. Fortunately we were able to put out the fire with only minor damage (mostly smoke) to the garage.
However, that's only a fire that will burn[1] at a rate roughly proportional to hows quickly it can mix with oxygen (that can be very fast* in some situations). Getting gasoline to act like a bomb and release it's energy at once[2] requires fairly specific conditions.
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.
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.
This product is, of course, more expensive but at least it's already being deployed.
Ha, 100 watt lightbulbs do not exist! /s