Scientists “bottle the sun” with a liquid battery that stores solar energy
sciencedaily.com
sciencedaily.com
I’d personally want to understand that before making any big plans, but this sounds cool.
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).
> 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.
The reaction triggered by heat doesn't release all the stored energy, which would be the bigger concern for unintended runaway reactions.
(Note: At high enough temperature the thermal energy will be high enough to go over the energy wall from the high energy isometric to the normal one. So it's plausible. But with high enough temperatures a lot of nasty things can happen, like total decomposition or just burning. So it may not be a good strategy to make a rechargable baterry.)
Blackberries store the sun too, and later release it as wine or jam :)
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 ..
absent of a major breakthrough solar will always be a house/grid level technology, which is fine and works at scale
you need a massive efficiency improvement to overcome this
we're still in the calculators and tv remotes level of on-device solar
This MOST process doesn't immediately look like it has home-scale applications (maybe in cold climates), but for heat to make steam, promising.
It runs off a 25cm square solar panel screwed to a wall that only receives direct illumination for 5 hours a day, and is not in any way optimised beyond 'that looks roughly like it's pointing at the sun'.
Works great!
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.
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.
Capturing some heat as non-heat still would make a house less warm in summer.
> 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
If you use it to heat a house in winter, wouldn’t losses be very low?
(Since you say “For myself, such a solution could provide only warm water for washing”, that use case doesn’t apply to you, but many people do need to heat their houses in winter)
> The energy stored per mass has little importance for a stationary system
For the use case I mentioned above, I think it matters. If you want to store heat for 6 months and then extract it, the volume/mass needed will be significant.
There also is a third loss: between the time you store the energy and the time you extract it. Many batteries have relatively high self-discharge (Google says 1-3% per month for Lithium-ion)
_If_ this does away with most of those losses, it could be competitive even though it is less efficient at capturing heat.
Having said that, this product probably has too low an energy density for that. Dry wood has ballpark ten times the energy per kg as modern batteries, but even for that, you need quite a bit of volume to warm a house in winter.
Usually you can do something like light->electricity->battery[x]->electricity->heatpump->heat. The efficient in the heatpump is like 300%, i.e. for every 1 Joule stored in the battery, the heatpump extracts 2 Joules from the ambient and sends 3 Joules of heat inside your home.
This device is something like light->bath[y]->heat.
If you assume both get the same amount of light, it's misleading to compare the energy stored in battery[x] and bath[y], because the first has a magic x3 later that comes from the heat pump. This sods not depends on the exact setup, but it's an important difference between "work" and "heat" in a thermal machine.
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.
There are already sand batteries that store heat well and are used in northern climates: https://polarnightenergy.com/news/worlds-largest-sand-batter...
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.
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
"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."
That being said, there are some "hot rocks" companies who have been working with thermoptovoltaic cells. Which could still work, but the low hanging fruit is in the millions of direct uses for heat.
The capex per unit of stored energy in undoubtedly far too high for that to be worthwhile. Seasonal energy storage requires extremely low cost storage media.
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
That's a bit concerning. Runaway waiting to happen.