Reinventing the battery: Donald Sadoway at TED2012

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://blog.ted.com/2012/02/29/reinventing-the-battery-donald-sadoway-at-ted2012/

[font face=Times, Times New Roman, Serif]29 February 2012
[font size=5]Reinventing the battery: Donald Sadoway at TED2012[/font]

[font size=3]“The electricity powering the lights in this theater was generated just moments ago,” says MIT professor, Donald Sadoway, now on stage at TED2012 to talk power. “The way things stand, electricity demand must be in balance with electricity supply.” The problem is: coal and nuclear plants can’t address demand fast enough. How do we deal with the problem of intermittency?

Sadoway thinks he has the answer, and in this hugely well-received talk, he outlines his invention of a liquid metal battery he thinks might act as a blueprint for the future. “If we’re going to get this country out of its current energy situation, we can’t conserve our way out, we can’t drill our way out, we can’t bomb our way out. We’re going to do it the old-fashioned American way: we’re going to invent our way out, working together,” he says to whoops of applause.

Realizing the critical importance of the humble battery as a way to help with the energy crisis — and that, nonetheless, there is simply “no battery technology capable of meeting the demanding performance requirements of the grid,” Sadoway started to think differently. “We need to abandon the paradigm of chasing the coolest chemistry to chase down the cost curve by making lots of products,” he says. Instead, he wanted to invent to the pricepoint of the electricity market. ”If you want to make something dirt-cheap, make it out of dirt. Preferably dirt that’s locally sourced.” He also decided to be seemingly perverse in his hunt for potential electricity storage, looking at a source that neither generates nor stores electricity but in fact consumes huge amounts of it: aluminum production.

And that’s how and why he discovered a way to sandwich necessary salts with both high- and low-density metals to harness the potential of aluminum smelting in the name of creating an electricity storage device. He didn’t necessarily think it would work — nor did any of his students, those he gathered to share in his “passion for science in the service of society, not science in service of career building.” Cutely, he paraphrases JFK at Rice University in 1962: “we choose to work on gridlevel storage not because it is easy but because it is hard.”

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http://www.npr.org/2012/03/02/147787321/the-battery-that-keeps-going-and-going

[font face=Times, Times New Roman, Serif][font size=5]Liquid Metal Battery Could Budget Sun's Energy[/font]
March 2, 2012

[font size=3]David Greene talks to materials chemist Donald Sadoway from the TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference in Long Beach, Calif. Sadoway is the co-inventor of the liquid metal battery. It's inexpensive, super efficient, sustainable and can provide large scale energy storage.

[font size=4]Transcript[/font]

Now news of what could be a miracle battery. Before you get too excited, it's not a battery that will give you extra juice in your cell phone or your laptop. But it is possible that a system of these new batteries could one day supply electricity to your neighborhood. We're talking about a liquid metal battery. MORNING EDITION's David Greene talked to the inventor, MIT professor Donald Sadoway.

DAVID GREENE, BYLINE: That's right. we caught up with Professor Sadoway at the Technology Entertainment and Design conference in Long Beach, California, where smart people like Sadoway get together to talk about their ideas.

So, Professor Sadoway, what's this battery look like?

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(Transcript and audio at link.)

http://sadoway.mit.edu/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Sadoway_Resume/141.pdf

[jmowreader]

1. He's also inventing an inverter big enough for this, right?

This is the thing: Batteries could be a good tool for power generation, but they store DC and the grid HAS to be AC. (They tried DC power transmission at the outset of electrification, and the power doesn't go very far before you lose it in the lines. AC current enabled the worldwide use of electricity.) If they can build an inverter--the thing that makes DC power into AC--large enough for a generating plant, all will be good.

[OKIsItJustMe]

2. Are you saying there aren't big enough inverters already?

Make's me wonder how HVDC works...


Seriously though, let's think about this for a moment. Let's say that you want to use a storage battery with a home solar panel array... which is DC, right? (Sounds like you already have a big enough inverter... otherwise that solar panels aren't terribly useful... unless you run your home on DC...)

OK, so what about a battery big enough for a utility scale PV farm? (Hmmm... must be that farm already has a large enough inverter. Right? Otherwise, why would a utility build the farm?)

Am I missing something here?

[Fumesucker]

3. That's just engineering..

We already know how inverters work and how to make them, increasing size and capacity is pretty much an engineering problem and not a scientific one.

The popularity of AC has more to do with the fact it's simple to change voltage up or down with transformers and induction motors are simple and have no sliding, sparking parts unlike DC brush motors.

Modern electronics has to a big extent made AC not particularly necessary, it's possible to distribute DC and generate AC on the spot where it's needed, mainly for things like motors.

[drm604]

5. Static Inverter Plant

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Static_inverter_plant

They've been doing it since the 70s.

[JoeFarmer]

4. Spam deleted by TBF (MIR Team)