Membraneless flow battery to smooth renewables' impact

‘For solar and wind power to be used in a significant way, we need a battery made of economical materials that are easy to scale and still efficient,’ said Yi Cui, a Stanford University associate professor of materials science and engineering. ‘We believe our new battery may be the best yet designed to regulate the natural fluctuations of these alternative energies.’

Cui and colleagues from Stanford and the US Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory report their research results in Energy & Environmental Science.

According to the university, the electricity grid cannot currently tolerate large and sudden power fluctuations caused by wide swings in sunlight and wind.

As solar and wind’s combined contributions to an electrical grid approach 20 per cent, energy storage systems must be available to smooth out the peaks and valleys of this intermittent power, storing excess energy and discharging when input drops.

Among the most promising batteries for intermittent grid storage today are ‘flow’ batteries, because it’s relatively simple to scale them to the sizes needed to handle large capacities of energy. The new flow battery developed by Cui’s group has a simplified, less expensive design that is claimed to present a potentially viable solution for large-scale production.