USC Scientists Create New Battery That’s Cheap, Clean, Rechargeable… and Organic

Image: USC professor Sri Narayan's research focuses on the fundamental and applied aspects of electrochemical energy conversion and storage to reduce the carbon footprint of energy use and by providing energy alternatives to fossil fuel, Wednesday, June 10, 2014 in Los Angeles. (USC Photo / Gus Ruelas)

Scientists at USC have developed a water-based organic battery that is long lasting, built from cheap, eco-friendly components.

The new battery – which uses no metals or toxic materials – is intended for use in power plants, where it can make the energy grid more resilient and efficient by creating a large-scale means to store energy for use as needed.

“The batteries last for about 5,000 recharge cycles, giving them an estimated 15-year lifespan,” said Sri Narayan, professor of chemistry at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and corresponding author of a paper describing the new batteries that was published online by the Journal of the Electrochemical Society on June 20. “Lithium ion batteries degrade after around 1,000 cycles, and cost 10 times more to manufacture.”

Narayan collaborated with Surya Prakash, Prakash, professor of chemistry and director of the USC Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute, as well as USC’s Bo Yang, Lena Hoober-Burkhardt, and Fang Wang.

“Such organic flow batteries will be game-changers for grid electrical energy storage in terms of simplicity, cost, reliability and sustainability,” said Prakash.

The batteries could pave the way for renewable energy sources to make up a greater share of the nation’s energy generation. Solar panels can only generate power when the sun’s shining, and wind turbines can only generate power when the wind blows. That inherent unreliability makes it difficult for power companies to rely on them to meet customer demand.

With batteries to store surplus energy and then dole it out as needed, that sporadic unreliability could cease to be such an issue.

“‘Mega-scale’ energy storage is a critical problem in the future of the renewable energy, requiring inexpensive and eco-friendly solutions,” Narayan said.

The new battery is based on a redox flow design – similar in design to a fuel cell, with two tanks of electroactive materials dissolved in water. The solutions are pumped into a cell containing a membrane between the two fluids with electrodes on either side, releasing energy.

The design has the advantage of decoupling power from energy. The tanks of electroactive materials can be made as large as needed – increasing total amount of energy the system can store – or the central cell can be tweaked to release that energy faster or slower, altering the amount of power (energy released over time) that the system can generate.

The team’s breakthrough centered around the electroactive materials. While previous battery designs have used metals or toxic chemicals, Narayan and Prakash wanted to find an organic compound that could be dissolved in water. Such a system would create a minimal impact on the environment, and would likely be cheap, they figured.

Through a combination of molecule design and trial-and-error, they found that certain naturally occurring quinones – oxidized organic compounds – fit the bill. Quinones are found in plants, fungi, bacteria, and some animals, and are involved in photosynthesis and cellular respiration.

“These are the types of molecules that nature uses for energy transfer,” Narayan said.

Currently, the quinones needed for the batteries are manufactured from naturally occurring hydrocarbons. In the future, the potential exists to derive them from carbon dioxide, Narayan said.

The team has filed several patents in regards to design of the battery, and next plans to build a larger scale version.

This research was funded by 

• the ARPA-E Open-FOA program (DE-AR0000337), 
• the University of Southern California, and 
• the Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute.

ORIGINAL: USC

Contact: Robert Perkins at (213) 740-9226 or perkinsr@usc.edu

June 25, 2014

Molten Salts Might Provide Half-Price Grid Energy Storage

A startup, Halotechnics, is building a pilot electricity storage system that will use molten salt.

WHY IT MATTERS

As intermittent renewable sources of energy generate more power, they’re straining the grid.

A small startup based in Emeryville, California, will build a pilot-scale energy storage system that could provide a cheaper, more practical way of storing large amounts of electricity and help enable the power grid accommodate large amounts of renewable energy.

Halotechnics has announced a deal with a partner to construct a one-megawatt plant that will store energy in molten salts—a technique previously used to store energy at some large solar thermal plants. The company says it will cost half as much as battery storage, and could compete with the cheapest way of storing large amounts of electricity—pumping water up a hill and using it to drive a turbine as gravity brings it back down.

Molten salt storage is less efficient than battery storage—only about 70 percent of the energy used to heat up the salts becomes electricity again, whereas batteries can be over 90 percent efficient. So Halotechnics will need to offset that inefficiency with low costs. The company’s energy storage technology is made possible using molten salts discovered using a high-throughput screening system built to discover new materials. Energy storage is becoming ever more important as the share of variable sources of energy like solar and wind power increases. The technology is one of several large-scale energy storage technologies being showcased this week at the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy Summit (see “ARPA-E’s Strategy for Survival”) in Washington, D.C.

Cheaper energy storage could also make the power grid more resilient and efficient by giving utilities more flexibility in how they produce and distribute power. Experts in grid energy at the ARPA-E summit say that storage will be central to restructuring the grid in coming decades, but current approaches, such as water storage, only work in certain situations and take up too much space.

Various types of salts are good at storing heat; they can be heated until they melt, and then stored in insulated containers. When the energy is needed, the molten salts can be pumped out to release their heat through a heat exchange system. Molten salts are being employed at solar thermal power plants to store heat from the sun during the day and then generate electricity at night.

Halotechnics is developing a new kind of system that uses a new molten salt chemistry to store energy from any source of electricity. It uses electricity to drive a heat pump, which can take low temperature heat. Halotechnics’s innovation is developing molten salts with the properties that allow them to store heat from off-the-shelf heat pumps. Developing the salts involved the use of a robotic system that combines many different types of salts and tests the properties of the resulting mixture, allowing it to quickly develop mixtures that have different properties.

Halotechnics had previously been focused on developing new energy storage materials for solar thermal technology (see “Cheap Solar Power at Night”). It has a $3.3 million grant from ARPA-E to develop materials that could store heat at temperatures of 1,200 °C, which would make it possible to shrink the number of mirrors used at solar thermal plants to generate electricity. It’s still developing these materials, but solar thermal technology is facing difficult times now that its competitor, photovoltaic solar panels, has fallen in price. Halotechnics’s new plan to store electricity from any source could be easier to bring to market. The company will be announcing the name of its new industrial partner in the coming months.

ORIGINAL: Technology Review

By Kevin Bullis

February 27, 2014

These Harvard researchers are making a new type of battery using the same molecule in rhubarb

photo: Eliza Grinnell, Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

Summary:

A funky battery that’s made of natural materials and uses liquid tanks is being developed in a lab at Harvard. If the breakthrough makes it to market it could be a low cost energy storage option for clean power.



Rhubarb isn’t just good for baking in pies — turns out the natural molecules found in the plant are being used as the basis for a new type of battery for the power grid, developed by a group of Professors at Harvard.

The Harvard researchers and engineers set out to build a low cost, metal-free flow battery, which is a type of battery that uses separate liquid tanks to store energy. In contrast, the batteries in your laptop and cell phone (and even in an electric car), use chemicals that are adjacent and enclosed in a casing. But by separating the electrolyte out of the battery, flow batteries can easily scale up and down (using larger and smaller tanks) to deliver the capacity needed, and can thus be lower cost than traditional batteries.

Because they can be inexpensive, power grid operators and utilities are looking at flow batteries carefully as a way to act as energy storage option on the power grid next to a wind or solar farm. These clean power sites generate energy only at certain times of day, and adding energy storage to clean power can make it more effective and economical.

Typical flow batteries use metal liquids like vanadium; or some next-gen ones, like startup EnerVault, are using metals like iron and chromium. The breakthrough with the Harvard researchers is that they’re using non-metal natural substances for the flow battery.

For the first iteration of the flow battery the researchers decided to turn to naturally-occurring organic molecules found in plants, animals and even oil called quinones. The best fit for the battery medium they wanted turned out to be the same quinones found in rhubarb. Go figure.

Harvard SEAS Professor Michael J. Aziz with the flow battery tech

The Harvard team discovered the right quinone molecule (out of more than 10,000) using a computing and sophisticated algorithms. Other universities are using computer models to find all sorts of battery breakthroughs.

So far the battery is working as well as the vanadium flow batteries on the market, but it’s much less expensive. The battery is still in the development phase, so a lot of things can change between now and commercialization. A release from Harvard noted that an application somewhere in the future could even be used at a home (say, in a basement), connected to a solar panel roof project.

The battery technology was first published in Nature on Wednesday, and the team received funding from the Department of Energy’s ARPA-E program, which gives small grants to early stage, high risk, research. The Harvard group plans to start commercializing the battery down the road with project developer Sustainable Innovations.

ORIGINAL: GigaOhm
By Katie Fehrenbacher
Jan. 8, 2014 - 12:45 PM PST

Innovación: Lección para Colciencias

ORIGINAL: El Mundo
Guillermo Maya Muñoz
23 de Septiembre de 2013

Add caption

Cuando se habla de innovación, por políticos y economistas, generalmente se argumenta que la innovación reside en las fuerzas del mercado, en el empresariado innovador con su capacidad para afrontar riesgos. El estado es lo opuesto de la innovación y el riesgo. El estado es lento, burocrático, y desperdicia recursos.

Sin embargo, la realidad de la innovación no parece ser así. La innovación no reside en el mercado sino en el estado, el gobierno. Los economistas neoliberales como publicistas de la iniciativa privada no estarán de acuerdo, protestarán y dirán que se equivocan quienes reclaman ese papel para el estado, que no hay nada superior al mercado.

Los trabajos de la investigadora y economista Mariana Mazzucato, egresada de la New School for Social Research University (NY) -también mi Alma Máter-, y profesora en la universidad de Sussex, Inglaterra, señalan al estado como el factor más importante para generar innovación tecnológica. Su reciente libro el Estado Empresarial: Derribando los Mitos Sector Público vs Sector Privado (The Entrepreneurial State, 2013) discurre sobre esta hipótesis, al igual que su libro previo (2011). La presentación del libro en su sitio web www.marianamazzucato.com se puede resumir así:

El "Estado Empresarial" echa por tierra el mito del Estado como una organización burocrática grande que puede en el mejor de los casos facilitar la innovación creativa que sucede en el dinámico sector privado. En el análisis de varios estudios de casos sobre el crecimiento impulsado por la innovación, el libro describe la situación opuesta, señalando que el sector privado sólo se atreve a invertir después de que el Estado ha realizado las inversiones de alto riesgo. Este libro sostiene que en la historia del capitalismo moderno, el Estado ha generado actividad económica que de otro modo no habría sucedido, y ha abierto activamente nuevas tecnologías y mercados en los que los inversores privados más adelante pueden entrar. Lejos de las críticas a menudo escuchadas al Estado de que potencialmente “desplaza” las inversiones privadas, el Estado hace que sucedan, formando y creando mercados, no sólo “corrigiendo” sus fallas. Ignorar esta realidad sólo sirve a fines ideológicos, y perjudica a la formulación de políticas eficaces.

Este libro examina estudios de casos que van desde el advenimiento de Internet al surgimiento de las industrias de la biotecnología y la nanotecnología. En particular, el volumen desmiente el mito de que Silicon Valley ha sido creado por el capital de riesgo privado. Un capítulo importante se centra en inversiones del estado detrás del éxito de Apple, y revela que todas las principales tecnologías que sustentan el desarrollo del iPhone deben su origen a los fondos públicos. Mientras las personas emprendedoras como Steve Jobs son necesarias, su éxito es casi imposible sin su habilidad para subirse a la ola de inversiones del Estado. Y si Europa quiere sus propios Googles, necesita más acción del Estado, no menos.

Dos de los capítulos del libro se centran en el examen de la próxima gran área de innovación después de internet: la “revolución verde”. Tanto la energía solar y la tecnología eólica actualmente están siendo guiados por el gasto del Estado, ya sea a través del programa ARPA-E (EE.UU) o por los bancos de inversión de los estados chino y brasileño. La discusión refrescante se mueve más allá de la habitual división entre los partidarios de la austeridad frente a los defensores de los estímulos fiscales. Argumenta que las inversiones del estado no sólo ayudan a disparar el crecimiento durante los períodos de recesión, sino que además, incluso en períodos de auge, conducen a inversiones productivas en nuevas tecnologías radicales que luego promueven décadas de crecimiento.

El libro termina con una pregunta fundamental: si el Estado es tan importante para las inversiones en innovación de alto riesgo, ¿por qué captura tan poco en el retorno directo de las inversiones? Sin embargo, Google y Apple por ejemplo, deberían devolver más a la sociedad, y los ciudadanos que financiaron sus innovaciones con impuestos.

¿Dónde estaría hoy Google sin las inversiones financiadas por el estado en el desarrollo de internet, y sin las subvenciones con que la Fundación Nacional de Ciencias de EE.UU (NSF) financió el descubrimiento de su propio algoritmo? ¿El iPad sería tan exitoso sin las innovaciones financiadas por el estado de las tecnologías de comunicación, GPS y pantalla táctil?

No se trata de que el estado corrija las fallas del mercado, o que la política industrial escoja a los “ganadores”, o que el gasto público estimule la demanda insuficiente, se trata de que el estado tome el papel líder en la innovación. El estado funciona, en términos de Mazzucato, en el papel de asumir los riesgos, abriendo el camino a nuevas tecnologías, antes de que el sector privado entre a rentabilizarlas en aplicaciones industriales.

En conclusión, para la realidad colombiana, la transformación de Colciencias, como instrumento institucional del gobierno para el desarrollo de la ciencia, la tecnología y la innovación, es una necesidad apremiante, a la luz de las experiencias de los países desarrollados, como las descritas y analizadas por Mazzucato. Es necesario un estado, y un sector privado, más comprometido con la ciencia y la investigación, sin dejar de lado el desarrollo experimental y la innovación. Sin embargo, Colciencias retrocede, y el gobierno la entrega a los políticos, de acuerdo a Moisés Wasserman, ex rector de la UN.