I don't know about this. Countless times researchers discover the next battery so much better than the current state-of-the-art being deployed, only to find out they just can't scale it. New battery technology is really hard.
Researchers have developed a water-based battery to store solar and wind energy
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Re: Researchers have developed a water-based battery to store solar and wind energy
#12I wonder how safe this will be with hydrogen gas being a part of it. Sounds promising but you’d want it extra safe considering a mini Hindenburg would be attached to your house. Edit. I suppose I read it incorrectly as this is being invented for the utility scale.
One of the major complaints when they trialed fuel cell buses in London years ago was that people though the fueling station would blow up ala hindenberg.
Re: Researchers have developed a water-based battery to store solar and wind energy
#13[deleted]
Re: Researchers have developed a water-based battery to store solar and wind energy
#14>Cui estimated that, given the water-based battery’s expected lifespan, it would cost a penny to store enough electricity to power a 100-watt lightbulb for twelve hours.
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.
Re: Researchers have developed a water-based battery to store solar and wind energy
#15"the researchers are confident they can scale up this table-top technology to an industrial-grade system"
Oh dear.
Re: Researchers have developed a water-based battery to store solar and wind energy
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, any vehicles you park in your garage or in your driveway probably have a lot of stored potential energy that can be released catastrophically under the wrong circumstances too. (this goes for whether it's ICE or electric). 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).
The wrong circumstances required to catastrophically release all of that energy in an ICE car is pretty extreme, requiring the fuel to atomize and thoroughly mix with air. Otherwise you have a fire, not a bomb. Hydrogen by contrast just needs a spark and then it comes to strongly resemble a bomb. If your hydrogen is under pressure, then simple containment failure can be the “spark” required. Plus, gasoline is easy to…
Gasoline evaporates under most normal conditions when exposed to air. Fiel soaked rags have been known to spontaneously ignite in garages.
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.
Re: Researchers have developed a water-based battery to store solar and wind energy
#17I don't know about this. Countless times researchers discover the next battery so much better than the current state-of-the-art being deployed, only to find out they just can't scale it. New battery technology is really hard.
Yes. Surface chemistry ("nanotechnology") seems to attract this sort of hype.
"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.
Re: Researchers have developed a water-based battery to store solar and wind energy
#18I don't know about this. Countless times researchers discover the next battery so much better than the current state-of-the-art being deployed, only to find out they just can't scale it. New battery technology is really hard.
Yes. Surface chemistry ("nanotechnology") seems to attract this sort of hype. "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 b…
Utility scale batteries optimize for energy/$, not energy density or weight etc.
Your comparisons are totally irrelevant.
Re: Researchers have developed a water-based battery to store solar and wind energy
#19This is really brilliant. They cycle between two chemical species that are thermodynamically very stable in our atmosphere, solid MnO2 and Mn2+. This is very smart as a starting point because you don't need to worry about the electrodes slowly rusting away (compare: related work with exotic/expensive/unstable rare earth oxides) Also this redox couple charges at 1.6 V so oxygen production (which is bad in a cell that…
Makes me wonder why they didn't think of this before or what challenges have they overcome this time.
Re: Researchers have developed a water-based battery to store solar and wind energy
#20This is really brilliant. They cycle between two chemical species that are thermodynamically very stable in our atmosphere, solid MnO2 and Mn2+. This is very smart as a starting point because you don't need to worry about the electrodes slowly rusting away (compare: related work with exotic/expensive/unstable rare earth oxides) Also this redox couple charges at 1.6 V so oxygen production (which is bad in a cell that…
Makes me wonder why they didn't think of this before or what challenges have they overcome this time.
It sounds too good to be true, right? Can't blame yourself for being skeptical so soon after the announcement.