Donald Sadoway: The missing link to renewable energy

[pokerfan]

Uploaded by TEDtalksDirector on Mar 26, 2012

What's the key to using alternative energy, like solar and wind? Storage -- so we can have power on tap even when the sun's not out and the wind's not blowing. In this accessible, inspiring talk, Donald Sadoway takes to the blackboard to show us the future of large-scale batteries that store renewable energy. As he says: "We need to think about the problem differently. We need to think big. We need to think cheap."

Without a good way to store electricity on a large scale, solar power is useless at night. One promising storage option is a new kind of battery made with all-liquid active materials. Prototypes suggest that these liquid batteries will cost less than a third as much as today's best batteries and could last significantly longer.

The battery is unlike any other. The electrodes are molten metals, and the electrolyte that conducts current between them is a molten salt. This results in an unusually resilient device that can quickly absorb large amounts of electricity. The electrodes can operate at electrical currents "tens of times higher than any [battery] that's ever been measured," says Donald Sadow­ay, a materials chemistry professor at MIT and one of the battery's inventors. What's more, the materials are cheap, and the design allows for simple manufacturing.

http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/22116/

[MindMover]

1. Great post, thanks...

[PoliticAverse]

2. There have been a lot of 'promising' technologies 'suggesting' much better batteries to come....

After so many have fizzled out I'm paying attention to only what I can actually buy.

[Auggie]

3. Fantastic -- can't come soon enough!

[pokerfan]

4. It seems quite scalable

Sounds like a battery the size of a shipping container could service service several hundred homes so that would potentially work at the substation level. For people off the grid, something the size of a large appliance might meet their needs.

[usrname]

5. One shipping container

Can supply 200 homes (according to the show). Stack a hundred of them on a pier and supply 20,000 homes.

Of course, these batteries still need to be hooked up to the grid to absorb the energy (presumably from solar or wind) before it can be released.

I wonder where it could be best utilized. I'd imagine a huge array of solar panels in the desert off of Las Vegas, generating electricity that will then be stored in these shipping containers stored in the outskirts of the city. By nightfall, these batteries will be used to supply electricity to the city. It could make Las Vegas electrically self-sufficient.

(Now, if only we can get Vegas to recycle their own water use...)