Bio-Inspired Battery Could Help Green the Grid

摘要

The biggest hurdle to getting more electricity from renewable energy sources is the intermittency of the sun and wind - a problem that better batteries with less expensive materials could solve by storing large amounts of energy until needed. Now scientists think they may have the solution, with the help of a little organic chemistry. Like conventional batteries, flow batteries store chemical energy and have a positive and negative electrode. When the battery is discharged, electrons and ions move from one electrode to the other, generating a current. Conventional battery materials are solid, while a flow battery's chemicals - often expensive because they're from rare metals - are liquid. To hold a large amount of energy, flow batteries need tanks capable of storing thousands of gallons of liquid. "If you want more energy, you just make bigger storage tanks," says Michael Aziz, an engineer at Harvard. "But the chemicals have to be cheap."