A team of Harvard scientists and engineers has demonstrated a new type of battery that could fundamentally transform the way electricity is stored on the grid, making power from renewable energy sources such as wind and sun far more economical and reliable, as reported two days ago in Nature (January 9th, 2014).
The Harvard team reports that the battery, which they say can be applied on a power-grid scale, uses naturally abundant and small organic compounds called quinones rather than electrocatalysts from costly precious metals such as platinum.
Quinones would be inexpensive to obtain and can be found in green plants or synthesized from crude oil. The battery designed by Harvard scientists and engineers used a quinone molecule that's almost identical to one that's found in rhubarb. The quinones in the Harvard team's battery are dissolved in water, which also prevents them from catching fire. These hydroquinones would perform a similar function to metal electrocatalysts such as platinum, because the molecules can store electrical energy efficiently.
My question: Can this new discovery of organic battery be cheap renewable energy solution? Your comments are welcome
For more info, see:
(a) http://www.cbc.ca/m/news/#!/content/1.2489300; and
(b) http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2014/01/renewable-energy-breakthrough/; and also
(c) http://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/2014/01/organic-mega-flow-battery-promises-breakthrough-for-renewable-energy
Always interesting to see how much money they can throw into this. We will publish an article soon on a storage solution for energy. Our PowerCan200 turn woodchip into synthesis gas. If you want a megawatt have 6 PowerCan 200 that's 5 working CHP engines one in reserve. We refer to the array of 6 CHP engines as our battleship. We can turn off any engine rejoining the grid fully operational within lets say 5 to 15 minutes.
The battery we are talking about is 100% organic its a cache of woodchip its a way of storing energy. It gets converted to CHP quickly. Now let's assume we want transport fuel. We use Concorde it's the tubular version of the FT reactor rather clever because it produces food grade Diesel bu mainly in the form of wax. Great thing about wax is that it easy to store all in all manner of containment wax is not volatile at all even at a naked flame. Once presented with a catalyst we have Diesel once again
The point I am making is that some much effort goes into rare metal technology when all around is are answers in abundance. The logical organic battery is woodchip we can turn this into Synthesis Gas and there is all the Hysrogen fuel you need so long as you stay mainstream it works better with the transportation systems we have today
wwww.powercan200.com
Dear Steve, thank you for your very interesting answer. It seems that there is alternative of quinone for energy storage. Beat wishes for your PowerCan200.
Ps: if you wish, feel free to join our new social network for renewable energy, www.sciprint.org
Dear Steve,
very interesting, but the process used by your solution doesn't seem to be reversible.
Could you please elaborate on that?
Hello,
we did a lot of work on quinone battery systems in the 1970th. It works, but the voltages are too low for application. Practical use might need at least 2 Volt per cell. You can see my work on my profile in Google Scholar. Would like to hear from your work in the future. Regards
Reinhard
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