14 DAY TRIAL // In order to accommodate fluctuating power inputs, future energy grids will have to have the ability to store electricity in dedicated batteries. Thus far, creating such energy-storage devices has proven to be very difficult, but now a Pittsburgh-based company believes it may have come up with a solution.
Representatives at the company say that their newest battery design meets the necessary requirements to be used as a large-scale energy-storage device. Power grids need to handle energy produced by solar panels and wind farms, which do not have regulated outputs.
If the Sun comes out of the clouds, then solar installations display a spike in production, flooding the power grid with extra power. Similarly, when a gust of strong wind blows over a wind farm, turbines start dumping more electricity into the power grids.
Such actions can have detrimental effects on the grid itself, as well as on devices that are hooked to it at the moment the surge happens. What experts need is a method of ensuring that energy is released through transport nodes in a steady stream.
This is where the batteries come in. What they do is store excess energy produced by alternative power plants, and then release it gradually, as if they were coal- or natural gas-powered installations. This has the added benefit of releasing solar energy even at night, when no production is possible in the panels.
Until now, the most advanced grid batteries were either too expensive to be meaningful, or had a short lifespan. Scientists say that they need devices capable of lasting for thousands of charge-recharge cycles, in order to justify the large sums of money needed to implement them.
Engineers at Aquion Energy developed a simple chemical solution to this predicament. The company announces the creation of a battery that uses water-based electrolytes and common chemicals such as sodium and manganese in order to retain and gradually release electricity.
According to representatives, Aquion Energy expects to provide a cost efficiency of about $300 dollars per kilowatt-hour of storage energy. This price is a third of what is required to do the same thing using highly-advanced lithium-ion batteries.
The effort to create these sodium-ion batteries is now financed by a $30 million venture capital the company secured recently. Aquion Energy is led by founder and CTO Jay Whitacre, Technology Review reports.