Like the materials inside the battery, the final size of the battery is yet to be determined. "This should be easy to scale up. If we want to make a battery the size of a 33 gallon garbage can we can do it," said Sadoway. "If we want to make [a battery] the size of a football field we could do it." One issue in scaling the size of the battery up is coming up with a cheap way to keep the liquid metal liquid. Right now the batteries have to be heated to a minimum of 500 degrees Celsius, just above the maximum temperature of the standard home oven. Liquid metal batteries would require about the same safety measures as a home oven, and could one day become a part of homes, hospitals, and other permanent structures. The batteries would be ideal for storing energy from wind or solar farms for use when the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing. Fully liquid metal batteries are most likely to replace other molten metal batteries (which have a solid membrane between anode and cathode), such as sodium sulfur batteries, which serve as back up batteries for hospitals during power outages, or could draw power from the electrical grid at night and then put the energy back into the grid when it's needed most, during the day. Fully liquid metal batteries are still years away however, say both Sadoway and other battery experts, including Marca Doeff, a material scientist and battery expert at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. "This is still a conceptual idea," said Doeff. "There are still engineering challenges that need to be overcome." Related Links: Discovery Tech for news, interviews and more TreeHugger: Molten Salt As Solar Heat Battery Video: Hear the inventor describe how the new liquid battery works. |
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