Organic Flow battery - potentially disruptive tech

This development could be of interest



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Flow batteries, which date back more than three decades, replace the solid electrodes of standard batteries with two liquid electrolytes. The liquids, contained in separated tanks, flow through a cell stack, letting ions and electrons move through a porous membrane in order to discharge and recharge the battery. They are considered good candidates for large-scale renewable energy storage because you can scale up the tank size of a flow battery in order to increase the megawatt-hours of storage available without being forced to also scale up the power capacity; with more traditional batteries like lithium-ion, the components come as a package deal, meaning to achieve 50 megawatt-hours of energy storage you also need to pay for 50 megawatts capacity.

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That said, flow batteries haven't yet taken the world by storm. The problem, generally, is cost. The most commercially advanced flow battery uses vanadium, an expensive metal; the team at Harvard, led by senior author Michael Aziz, eliminated metals entirely from their version of a flow battery.

Having a battery which can be refueled addresses several of the problems electrically recharging battery-powered cars, where you need a lot of power to quickly recharge a car for a decent range

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