Harvard Study Of Quinones Flow Battery - Business Insider
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A Chemical Compound Found In Rhubarb Has Just Solved Renewable Energy's Biggest Problem
Rob Wile
Jan. 10, 2014, 1:41 PM 29,764 27
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rhubarb pie
purpleslog/flickr
We recently explained why insufficient energy storage is renewable energy's biggest problem: When the sun is not shining or the wind isn't blowing, it creates all kinds of disruptions to the electric grid.
Existing solutions to the problem are extremely expensive, and aren't even that efficient.
Now, Harvard researchers say they've found a cheap solution that addresses both those problems.
In a new paper published Jan. 9 in the journal Nature, they say an overlooked group of organic compounds, called quinones, can be used to create an inexpensive battery capable of charging and discharging renewable electricity much more rapidly than existing metal batteries can.
"That's really our innovation — quinones turn out to be naturally abundant and very inexpensive and very stable," co-author Michael Aziz told Business Insider by phone Friday.
The trick is that they are water soluble, which means you can set up large, inexpensive tanks to hold electricity, instead of having to engineer solid-state batteries like ones found in cars. These "flow batteries" would be capable of storing one kilowatt hour of energy using chemicals that cost $27, a third of the price of existing systems, according to a write-up of the study in Nature. The quinone molecule the team used in its mock-up is almost identical to the one found in rhubarb. Quinones can also be found in crude oil.
Here's what the setup looks like on a lab-model scale:
harvard flow battery
Harvard SEAS
"The whole world of electricity storage has been using metal ions in various charge states but there is a limited number that you can put into a solution and use to store energy, and none of them can economically store massive amounts of renewable energy," co-author Roy Gordonsaid said in a statement. "With organic molecules, we introduce a vast new set of possibilities. Some of them will be terrible and some will be really good. With these quinones we have the first ones that look really good."
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Harvard Study Of Quinones Flow Battery - Business Insider