Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumThe Forever Battery
Imergy Power Systems headquarters in an office park in one of Silicon Valleys less glamorous precincts is the type of place where the future used to be invented. There are no Beats headphones-wearing 20-somethings on scooters. No foosball tables, rooftop beer garden or ironically named conference rooms. No birdhouses. Just a sea of drab, blue-gray cubicles. The median employee age appears to be around that of the typical software engineer who files an age-discrimination lawsuit. There are scientists wearing white lab coats. Some have white hair. The chief executive is 61 thats 120 in Silicon Valley years.
Needless to say, Imergy is not developing the next $19 billion app that Facebook will acquire, but the startup could end up powering Facebook.
"Basically, our battery lasts forever."
Imergy has spent years perfecting an energy storage device that, if it lives up to its billing, will help accelerate the big green future by allowing companies and homeowners to pull the plug on their local utility by banking electricity from solar arrays and wind farms for use when the sun is not shining or the wind is not blowing. A 250-kilowatt battery system installed in a 40-foot container, for instance, could store solar energy from the rooftop arrays of a 40-home neighborhood for later use.
This magic box is called a Vanadium redox flow battery. The heart of a flow battery are two electrolyte solutions one positive, one negative contained in separate tanks. When the solutions are pumped through a power cell containing a membrane, a chemical reaction takes place that generates electricity. When the process is reversed, the electrolyte stores energy.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/04/the-forever-battery/361167/
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One more nail in the coffin of dinosaur fuel
defacto7
(13,485 posts)All glory laud and honor be to thee... thou battery most high.
I love batteries! Especially eternal ones. (I think I just mixed up eternal with everlasting.. oops)
madokie
(51,076 posts)until today I've wondered why they haven't put more effort in developing them. For instance for an automobile pull into a service station, if you will, and recharge the battery. Rather than connect your automobile to an electrical connection you connect to a machine that removes the used, for the lack of a better term, electrolyte and replaces it with a new, charged electrolyte.
If sulfuric acid wasn't so dangerous to handle I'd see what happens when I discharge a lead acid battery and rather than connect to a charger simply pour out the acid and replace it with fresh acid. As a teen I worked in a service station and we sold batteries as well as gasoline, oil and tires and other related items. When we got our shipment of batteries they were empty of the electrolyte and when someone would buy one we'd fill the cells with sulfuric acid and then put the battery in the automobile and away they'd go. The battery wouldn't be fully charged but it would have enough energy to start the automobile.
At any rate I think there is some promise in flow batteries