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Researchers Design a New Low Cost Lithium-Polysulfide Flow Battery
Researchers Design a New Low Cost Lithium-Polysulfide Flow Battery | SciTech Daily
May 24, 2013 by Staff
Researchers Design a New Low Cost Lithium-Polysulfide Flow Battery | SciTech Daily
May 24, 2013 by Staff
Menlo Park, California — Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have designed a low-cost, long-life battery that could enable solar and wind energy to become major suppliers to the electrical grid.
“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 associate professor of materials science and engineering and a member of the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences, a SLAC/Stanford joint institute. “We believe our new battery may be the best yet designed to regulate the natural fluctuations of these alternative energies.”
Cui and colleagues report their research results, some of the earliest supported by the DOE’s new Joint Center for Energy Storage Research battery hub, in the May issue of Energy & Environmental Science.
In this video, Stanford graduate student Wesley Zheng demonstrates the new low-cost, long-lived flow battery he helped create. The researchers created this miniature system using simple glassware. Adding a lithium polysulfide solution to the flask immediately produces electricity that lights an LED. A utility version of the new battery would be scaled up to store many megawatt-hours of energy. Credit: SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
Currently the electrical grid cannot 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 percent, 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.
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