A marriage made in sunlight: Invention merges solar with liquid battery

[kristopher]

A marriage made in sunlight: Invention merges solar with liquid battery
September 22, 2016 by David Tenenbaum

This solar-charged battery, developed in the lab of Song Jin at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, directly stores energy from sunlight in a tank. Credit: David Tenenbaum

As solar cells produce a greater proportion of total electric power, a fundamental limitation remains: the dark of night when solar cells go to sleep. Lithium-ion batteries, the commonplace batteries used in everything from hybrid vehicles to laptop computers, are too expensive a solution to use on something as massive as the electric grid.

Song Jin, a professor of chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has a better idea: integrating the solar cell with a large-capacity battery. He and his colleagues have made a single device that eliminates the usual intermediate step of making electricity and, instead, transfers the energy directly to the battery's electrolyte.

Jin chose a "redox flow battery," or RFB, which stores energy in a tank of liquid electrolyte.

In a report now online in Angewandte Chemie International Edition, Jin, graduate student Wenjie Li, and colleagues at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia have demonstrated a single device that converts light energy into chemical energy by directly charging the liquid electrolyte.

Discharging the battery to power...

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-09-marriage-sunlight-merges-solar-liquid.html#jCp

[tazkcmo]

1. It seems to happen weekly

Another step forward in solar energy storage. I'm grateful to be alive and able to witness the evolution.

[awoke_in_2003]

2. K&R

We could be leading the world if we would just invest in research. We need the type of challenge that spurred Gemini and Apollo.

[Ghost Dog]

3. Excellent.

Please scale up and implement immediately, everywhere.