How can we use renewable energy when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing?

Wind and solar energy is great – clean, efficient and cheap. But there’s a downside when it comes to storing it. Currently, we use four distinct methods to store large amounts of energy: lithium-ion batteries, sodium-ion, liquid metal and flow battery technology. A team from Harvard University looked at how they could improve the latter – flow batteries, so that they can be efficiently used on a large scale, like an electrical power grid, while still being cost-effective.

Flow batteries are already pretty cheap in comparison with other alternatives for large-scale energy storage, like the above-mentioned power grid. Relying on metals like vanadium and platinum, it’s clear that costs for these sort of energy storage technologies are pretty high, nonetheless. But now researches have come up with an innovative way that can make wind and solar energy a lot more efficient and accessible.

Instead of expensive metals and chemicals, the Harvard team focused on what nature has to teach us and have shown that organic compounds soluble in water can do what metals and chemicals in flow batteries do. It’s pretty much what you see going on inside plants, where energy is stored in certain molecules; molecules that are found in all green veggies and crude oil, says Michael Aziz from the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

We all know that wind and solar energy is only efficient and reliable as long as there is… well, wind and sunshine! With the use of different energy storage technologies, like the aforementioned flow batteries, the extra energy produced in a windy day or a very bright sunny day can be stored away for later use.

With flow batteries, the principle is pretty simple. You get energy from wind and solar plants and transform that electric energy into chemical energy, like hydrogen gas. The gas is stored then and used later on to produce electrical energy again. Flow batteries get their name from that exact process: electrical to gas, gas to electrical circuit; the back and forth process. Even with this process however, you’d still need to rely on large containers for storing the chemical energy, like the hydrogen gas for later use – but it’s a way cheaper alternative than its expensive metal-based flow battery counterpart.

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Greenshine New Energy, LLC. Specializes in developing and manufacturing customized solar powered lighting systems for a wide range of lighting applications. At Greenshine we specialize in solar street lights, garden lights, and lawn lights for outdoor applications. Our lights can be installed anywhere, especially areas where grid tied electricity is not available.