Renewable energy might be clean, but it’s not always reliable if the Sun ducks behind clouds or the wind slacks off. To counter that variability, the grid will need to combine a range of different sources, such as solar, wind, hydro, waves, and biomass, with large-scale energy storage systems. Now, an MIT team has developed a new type of battery that could fit the bill. It breathes air, and can store energy long-term for about a fifth of the cost of existing technologies.
The new design is a rechargeable flow battery, meaning its cathode and anode components are liquids (catholyte and anolyte) that pass ions back and forth to store or release energy. In this case, the anolyte is made up of sulfur dissolved in water, and the hunt for an equally abundant material for the catholyte led the team to an oxygenated liquid salt solution.
“We went on a search for a positive electrode that would also have exceptionally low cost that we could use with sulfur as the negative electrode,” says Yet-Ming Chiang, co-author of the study. “Through an accidental laboratory discovery, we figured out that it could actually be oxygen, and therefore air. We needed to add one other component, which was a charge carrier to go back and forth between the sulfur and air electrode, and that turned out to be sodium.”
The clever part of the battery is the fact that the catholyte “breathes” in air in from outside while discharging, and exhales while recharging. By this mechanism, the battery creates negatively-charged hydroxide ions in the catholyte while inhaling, and while recharging that oxygen is released, creating hydrogen ions which then send electrons back into the anolyte.
“This battery literally inhales and exhales air, but it doesn’t exhale carbon dioxide, like humans — it exhales oxygen,” says Chiang. “What this does is create a charge balance by taking oxygen in and out of the system.”
Elon Musk has gotten a lot of attention for his proposed efforts to rebuild Puerto Rico’s electric grid, which could prove how cheap and valuable solar and energy storage could be in the decades ahead. Musk’s plan isn’t public yet, but it would likely mean bringing Powerpacks to the island to help deal with outages that still affect 90% of consumers. And this may be an instance where Tesla 
A new redox flow battery demonstration project was launched in Belfast, Northern Ireland, this week.
Hawaiian Electric Co. (HECO) has big plans for energy storage, but is wary of moving too quickly. The utility is looking for better storage technology and economics before moving too much on deployment.
Reality is, that most people who want solar power on their home actually want energy storage as well. We want energy storage because if the grid goes down, we want our house to run smoothly – day or not, sunny or cloudy. Additionally, many of us hold onto the dream of disconnecting from The Man.
A new study by Navigant Research indicates annual installations of utility-scale 
California is on the cusp of a dramatic jump in deploying cost-saving, climate-solving technology in the form of customer-sited energy storage, but the industry needs help cutting red tape that keeps the cost of the technology unnecessarily high for customers.
Elon Musk didn’t need 100 days after obtaining a connection agreement to switch on the Tesla big battery in South Australia. In fact, it took him less than 100 minutes.
