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Lithium-Polysulfide Flow Battery Could Help Solar and Wind Energy Power the Grid

Currently the electrical grid cannot tolerate large and sudden power fluctuations caused by wide swings in sunlight and wind. Among the most promising batteries for intermittent grid storage today are 'flow' batteries, because it's relatively simple to scale their tanks, pumps, and pipes to the sizes needed to handle large capacities of energy. 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 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.

Topics:
Batteries Energy Energy Storage LEDs Lighting Power Power Management Renewable Energy Solar Power Wind Power

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    Transcript

    00:00:00 Hi, I'm Wesley. Uh, today at Stanford, I'm going to show you some flow battery. And so here we have a flask. Inside we have a lithium anodes and a carbon current collectors. And I'm going to show you a polyulfide flow batteries. And right now I'm going to put in some uh catholite, which is the polyulfide, and it's going to light up these red LEDs.

    00:00:26 So here I'm going to draw up some polyulfide from this big flask. And I'm going to put this catalyte into this flask. And as you can see, it actually lights up the red LED lights. So here we go. We have the DM polyulfite flow batteries.