New Battery Technologies Developed That Don't Need Rare Materials

This system stores energy as molten silicon and extracts it through a turbine when needed. 1414 degrees

The race to find new ways to store electricity has some new and surprising entrants. Two new arrivals have the advantage of using extremely common elements, making them potentially very cheap to build. Neither is likely to power your phone or laptop, and they probably won't be suited to electric cars, but they might store solar or wind energy for still nights and cloudy days.




"Organic solids are not typically contemplated as crystalline electrode materials, but many are very crystalline, arranged in a very ordered structure," Ji said in a statement. "This PTCDA material has a lot of internal space between its molecule constituents so it provides an opportunity for storing big ions and good capacity."

Silicon makes up 28 percent of the Earth's crust, so it's also abundantly available. The company 1414 Degrees has spent years trying to turn work initially done by Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) into an economically feasible method for storing energy in the form of molten silicon, and recently announced the first tests of a prototype.

Energy is used to melt silicon, which, as the company's name suggests, occurs at 1,414ºC (2,577ºF). When the silicon is allowed to cool the energy drives a turbine to turn it back into electricity. Although this process can theoretically be used for a wide variety of materials, silicon has the advantage of holding heat far longer than most alternatives, and providing more stable power as it cools.




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