Image: MIT

The future of renewable energy heavily depends on energy storage technologies. At the center of these technologies are oxygen-evaluation reactions, which make possible such processes as water splitting, electrochemical carbon dioxide reduction, and ammonia production.

However, the kinetics of the oxygen-evolution reactions tend to be slow. But metal oxides involved in this process have catalytic activities that vary over several orders of magnitude, with some exhibiting the highest such rates reported to date. The origins of these activates are not well-understood by the scientific community.

A new study from MIT, led by 2016 winner of the Battery Division Research Award, Yang Shao-Horn, shows that in some of these catalysts, the oxygen does not only come from surrounding water molecules – some actually come from within the crystal lattice of the catalyst material itself.

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Biofuels have become a promising potential alternative for traditional fossil fuels. However, producing biofules only make sense if the greenhouse gasses emitted are less than other means of producing energy.

According to new research, sugarcane and nepiegrass could be two of the most promising candidates for biofuel production due to their ability to isolate more carbon dioxide in the soil than is lost in the atmosphere.

Sugarcane and nepiegrass both have large carbon-storing root biomass that can offset the carbon dioxide emitted during cultivation. To test this, researchers observed these plants in Hawaii over a two year period, measuring both the above- and below-ground biomass and resulting greenhouse gas flux.

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Renewable energy is on the rise, but how we store that energy is still up for debate.

“Renewable energy is growing, but it’s intermittent,” says Grigorii Soloveichik, program director at the United States Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency. “That means we need to store that energy and we have two ways to do that: electricity or liquid fuels.”

According to Soloveichik, electricity and batteries are sufficient for short term energy storage, but new technologies such as liquid fuels derived from renewable energy must be considered for long term storage.

During the PRiME 2016 meeting in October, Soloveichik presented a talk titled, “Development of Transformational Technologies,” where he described the advantages that carbon neutral liquid fuels have over other convention means – such as batteries – for efficient, affordable, long term storage for renewable energy sources.

Rise of renewables

In the United States, 16.9 percent of electricity generation comes from renewables – a 9.3 percent increase since 2015. Globally, climate talks such as the Paris Agreement help bolster the rise of renewable energy around the world. Soloveichik expects that growth to continue in light of the affordability of clean energy technologies and government mandates that aim at environmental protection and a reduction of the carbon footprint. However, the continued rise in renewable dependence will impact the current grid infrastructure.

“More renewables will result in more stress on the grid,” Soloveichik says. “All of these new sources are intermittent, so we need to be able to store huge amounts of energy.”

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Bill Gates is taking climate change head on with his newly formed Breakthrough Energy Ventures fund. Gates is leading the fund along with a network of investors worth $170 billion, including Virgin’s Richard Branson and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.

BEV will donate more than $1 billion into clean energy innovation projects over the next 20 years, focusing on its goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

“Anything that leads to cheap, clean, reliable energy we’re open-minded to,” Gates says.

This move by Gates comes after his commitment last year to personally invest an additional $1 billion into clean energy.

However, this move will shift Gates away from his home turf of information technology.

“People think you can just put $50 million in and wait two years and then you know what you got,” Gates says. “In this energy space, that’s not true at all.”

A driving force behind the fund is to take innovative new technologies from the lab to the marketplace. Currently, the federal government funds a huge percentage of fundamental research efforts in fields such as energy storage, which are the subsequently commercialized by private investors.

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A team of researchers at Case Western Reserve University is building a flow battery prototype to provide cleaner, cheaper power.

The team, co-led by ECS member Bob Savinell, is working to scale up the technology in order develop a practical, efficient energy storage device that can store excess electricity and potentially augment the grid in light of a shift toward renewables.

With a $1.17 million federal grant, the team has started to build a 1-kilowatt prototype with enough power to run various, high-powered household devices for six hours.

“Intermittent energy sources, such as solar and wind, combined with traditional sources of coal and nuclear power, are powering the grid. To meet peak demand, we often use less-efficient coal or gas-powered turbines,” says Savinell, ECS Fellow and editor of the Journal of The Electrochemical Society. “But if we can store excess energy and make it available at peak use, we can increase the overall efficiency and decrease the amount of carbon dioxide emitted and lower the cost of electricity.”

One of the biggest barriers preventing the large-scale use of electrochemical energy storage devices has been the cost. To address this, Savinell and his team have been developing the flow battery with cheaper materials, such as iron and water.

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After a short hiatus, Clean Technica’s Celantech Talk podcast has returned. For their first episode back, ECS member and podcast co-host Matthew Klippenstein discusses speed bumps in renewable energy, transforming the grid, and the demise of diesel.

Klippenstein is a 13 year veteran of the fuel cell industry with Ballard Power Systems. He was part of the 2007 group that received ECS’s Industrial Electrochemistry and Electrochemical Engineering Division New Electrochemical Technology Award, which has recognized significant advances in industrial electrochemistry since 1997. Listen to the podcast below.

PS: To learn more about science and some of the key contributors, download the ECS Podcast for free through the iTunes Store, SoundCloud, or our RSS Feed. You can also find us on Stitcher.

Just over ten years ago, the number of electric vehicles on the road could be counted in the hundreds. Now, more than 1.3 million EVs have been deployed across the globe. But even as EVs become a stronger force in the transportation sector, many buyers still cite one major deterrent in going electric: range anxiety.

Range anxiety refers to the fear that during longer trips, the EV battery may run out of energy and leave drivers stranded without a charging station. However, Ford, BMW, and VW are planning to but this fear to rest in Europe where they’re planning to develop a networking of charging stations along major highways.

The car companies believe this implementation of these stations will help enable long-rage travel and facilitate the mass-market adoption of EVs. Because current EVs cannot exceed a 300 mile driving range on single charge, the establishment of ultra-fast charging stations will help take away some of the anxiety drivers feel behind the wheel.

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Image: Powin Energy

Powin Energy, a company focused on creating dynamic energy storage solutions, recently announced their plan to install a 30 kW/40 kW-hour battery system at the University of Washington’s Washington Clean Energy Testbeds. The testbed facility was developed by UW to scale-up, prototype, test, and validate new clean energy solutions. Powin Energy hopes to assist the researchers at the facility in their quest to develop clean energy innovation.

“We’re excited about this installation at the University of Washington because it will give our technology a more rigorous workout than most real-world installations that don’t approach the far ends of usage parameters,” Virgil Beaston, CTO of Powin Energy, said in a statement.

Venkat Subramanian, technical editor of the Journal of The Electrochemical Society and UW professor, discussed this energy storage opportunity, stating the he and his team could “use the Powin BESS to measure the performance of energy devices and algorithms when integrated into real and simulated system environments.”

Powin’s partnership with UW comes after the company’s development of its newly patented Battery Pack Operating system, which was designed to make its way into the utility-scale storage market. The company has already installed a 2MW/8MW-hour battery system in Irvine, CA.

Researchers from the University of California, Riverside recently combined photosynthesis and physics to make a key discovery that could lead to highly efficient solar cells.

Nathan Gabor, a physicist, began exploring photosynthesis when he asked himself a fundamental question in 2010: Why are plants green? This question probed him to combine his physics training with biology.
Over the past six years, Gabor has been rethinking energy conversion in light of these questions. His goal was to make solar cells that more efficiently absorb intermittent energy from the sun and increase past the current 20 percent efficiency. In this, he was inspired by the plants that had evolved over time to do exactly what he hoped solar cells would be able to do.

This from University of California, Riverside:

[The scientists] addressed the problem by designing a new type of quantum heat engine photocell, which helps manipulate the flow of energy in solar cells. The design incorporates a heat engine photocell that absorbs photons from the sun and converts the photon energy into electricity.

Surprisingly, the researchers found that the quantum heat engine photocell could regulate solar power conversion without requiring active feedback or adaptive control mechanisms. In conventional photovoltaic technology, which is used on rooftops and solar farms today, fluctuations in solar power must be suppressed by voltage converters and feedback controllers, which dramatically reduce the overall efficiency.

Read the full article.

At the core of the research, Gabor and his team are looking to connect quantum mechanical structure to the greenest plants.

ECS member Steve Martin receives a $2.5M grant to pursue research in glassy solids.
Image: Christopher Gannon

The world relies on battery power. The smartphone market alone – which is powered by lithium-ion batteries – is expected to reach 1.5B units in 2016. ECS member Steve Martin believes he may be able to take those batteries to the next level through efforts in glassy solids.

Martin, a professor at Iowa State University and associate of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory, has been in the field of battery research for over 30 years. Throughout that time, his main focus of research has shifted to measuring the basic properties of glassy solids and trying to understand how their ions move and the thermal and chemical stability.

Martin believes that using glass solids as the electrolytes in batteries would make them safer and more powerful. This is an effort to diverge from traditional liquid-electrolyte batteries, which have experienced issues with safety and energy capacity.

To push this research, Martin recently received a three-year, $2.5M grant from the DOE.

“This is my dream-come-true project,” Martin says. “This is what I’ve been working on for 36 years.”

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