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New Battery Design Could Help Solar and Wind Power the Grid by Staff Clean Edge News, April 26, 2013

Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have designed a low-cost, long-life "flow" battery that could enable solar and wind energy to become major suppliers to the electrical grid.

The research, led by Yi Cui, a Stanford associate professor and member of the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences, is a product of the new Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR), a DOE Energy Innovation Hub. Led by Argonne National Laboratory, with SLAC as major partner, JCESR is one of five such Hubs created by the Department to accelerate energy research and was established last November.

While solar and wind make a substantial contribution to the nation's energy supply, they also create significant power fluctuations, which can sometimes exceed the tolerances of the electrical grid. "Flow" batteries, such as developed by Cui's group, can smooth those fluctuations.

Their new flow battery uses a simplified, less-expensive design than other batteries, which may improve its scalability and cost-effectiveness. In laboratory tests, it also demonstrated excellent energy-storage performance through the equivalent of more than 5 1/2 years of daily charge and discharge cycles. The result was reported in the journal Energy & Environmental Science.

Going forward, Cui's group plans to make a laboratory-scale system to optimize its energy storage process and identify potential engineering issues. It also plans to start discussions with potential hosts for a full-scale field-demonstration unit.