New Ten-Year Battery Could Make Wind Power Better Than Ever

 

Researchers at Harvard have developed a battery that could run for "more than a decade" with only minimal upkeep.

Anyone's who has ever had experience with lithium-ion batteries—that is to say, anyone who's owned a smartphone—is familiar with the problem of longevity. Over time, they simply wear out. A few years of daily charging is more than any li-on can bear under even the best of circumstances. "Lithium-ion batteries don't even survive 1000 complete charge/discharge cycles," says Michael Aziz, Professor of Materials and Energy Technologies at Harvard who led the study.

By contrast, the new battery developed by Aziz's team only loses one percent of its capacity after a thousand charges. It's based on the concept of a flow battery, which is generally powered by two chemical components dissolved in liquids that are actually pumped through the battery system. Flow batteries keep their energy in external tanks, the bigger the better.

"Because we were able to dissolve the electrolytes in neutral water, this is a long-lasting battery that you could put in your basement," says Roy Gordon, who led the study alongside Aziz, in a press release. "If it spilled on the floor, it wouldn't eat the concrete and since the medium is noncorrosive, you can use cheaper materials to build the components of the batteries, like the tanks and pumps."

Key innovation here is the use of the compound ferrocene. Discovered accidentally in 1951, it's known for its electrochemical properties and has been used as a stand-in for gasoline. "Ferrocene is great for storing charge but is completely insoluble in water," says postdoc student Eugene Beh. "It has been used in other batteries with organic solvents, which are flammable and expensive."

The trick, then, was getting insoluble molecules to function like highly soluble ones. "Aqueous soluble ferrocenes represent a whole new class of molecules for flow batteries," says Aziz.

These type of long-lasting batteries might not find a way into your phone any time soon, but they could prove crucial for solar and wind energy. As the costs of renewable energy goes down across the planet, its use rises, with experts predicting the peak for fossil fuels hitting in 2020.

Among the chief challenges that solar and wind power present is that of intermittency—they don't generate energy when the wind doesn't blow or the sun doesn't shine. Sometimes they produce too little energy but other times, as Texas found out the hard way, they produce too much. A battery capable of massive amounts of storage with only minimal need for upkeep could siphon off when power when turbines threaten to overpower transmission lines and send it in periods below peak efficiency.

This has been a goal for a while now. Below is Aziz talking about it in a video from the Department of Energy in 2013. The new battery could be a major step towards making this dream a reality.

Source: Harvard