{"id":151100,"date":"2014-01-08T13:00:41","date_gmt":"2014-01-08T18:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"\/gazette\/?p=151100"},"modified":"2019-04-01T15:44:28","modified_gmt":"2019-04-01T19:44:28","slug":"renewable-energy-breakthrough","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/story\/2014\/01\/renewable-energy-breakthrough\/","title":{"rendered":"Battery offers renewable energy breakthrough"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\t
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A metal-free flow battery that relies on the electrochemistry of naturally abundant, inexpensive, small organic (carbon-based) molecules was designed, built, and tested in the laboratory of SEAS Professor Michael J. Aziz (pictured).<\/p>

Eliza Grinnell\/SEAS Communications<\/p><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\t

\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\tScience & Tech\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\n\t\t

\n\t\tBattery offers renewable energy breakthrough\t<\/h1>\n\n\t\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\n\t
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\n\t\tPaul Karoff\t<\/p>\n\t\t\t

\n\t\t\tSEAS Communications\t\t<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/address>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t\t

\n\t\t\tHarvard technology could economically store energy for use when the wind doesn\u2019t blow and the sun doesn\u2019t shine\t\t<\/h2>\n\t\t\n<\/header>\n\n\n\n
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A team of Harvard scientists and engineers has demonstrated a new type of battery that could fundamentally transform the way electricity is stored on the grid, making power from renewable energy sources such as wind and sun far more economical and reliable.<\/p>\n

The novel battery technology is reported in a paper<\/a> published in Nature on Jan. 9. Under the OPEN 2012 program, the Harvard team received funding from the U.S. Department of Energy\u2019s Advanced Research Projects Agency \u2014 Energy (ARPA-E)<\/a> to develop the grid-scale battery, and plans to work with the agency to catalyze further technological and market breakthroughs over the next several years.<\/p>\n

The paper describes a metal-free flow battery that relies on the electrochemistry of naturally abundant, inexpensive, small organic (carbon-based) molecules called quinones, which are similar to molecules that store energy in plants and animals.<\/p>\n

The mismatch between the availability of intermittent wind or sunshine and the variable demand is the biggest obstacle to using renewable sources for a large fraction of our electricity. A cost-effective means of storing large amounts of electrical energy could solve this problem.<\/p>\n

The battery was designed, built, and tested in the laboratory of Michael J. Aziz<\/a>, the Gene and Tracy Sykes Professor of Materials and Energy Technologies at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences<\/a> (SEAS). Roy G. Gordon<\/a>, the Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Materials Science, led the work on the synthesis and chemical screening of molecules. Al\u00e1n Aspuru-Guzik<\/a>, professor of chemistry and chemical biology, used his pioneering high-throughput molecular screening methods to calculate the properties of more than 10,000 quinone molecules in search of the best candidates for the battery.<\/p>\n

\u201cImagine a device the size of a home heating-oil tank sitting in your basement. It would store a day\u2019s worth of sunshine from the solar panels on the roof of your house …” \u2014 Michael Marshak<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Flow batteries store energy in chemical fluids contained in external tanks, as with fuel cells, instead of within the battery container itself. The two main components \u2014 the electrochemical conversion hardware through which the fluids are flowed (which sets the peak power capacity) and the chemical storage tanks (which set the energy capacity) \u2014 may be independently sized. Thus the amount of energy that can be stored is limited only by the size of the tanks. The design permits larger amounts of energy to be stored at lower cost than with traditional batteries.<\/p>\n

By contrast, in solid-electrode batteries, such as those commonly found in cars and mobile devices, the power conversion hardware and energy capacity are packaged together in one unit and cannot be decoupled. Consequently they maintain peak discharge power for less than an hour before they are drained, and are therefore ill-suited to store intermittent renewables.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur studies indicate that one to two days\u2019 worth of storage is required for making solar and wind dispatchable through the electrical grid,\u201d said Aziz.<\/p>\n

To store 50 hours of energy from a 1-megawatt power capacity wind turbine (50 megawatt-hours), for example, a possible solution would be to buy traditional batteries with 50 megawatt-hours of energy storage, but they would come with 50 megawatts of power capacity. Paying for 50 megawatts of power capacity when only 1 megawatt is necessary makes little economic sense.<\/p>\n

For this reason, a growing number of engineers have focused their attention on flow-battery technology. But until now, flow batteries have relied on chemicals that are expensive or hard to maintain, driving up the cost of storing energy.<\/p>\n

The active components of electrolytes in most flow batteries have been metals. Vanadium is used in the most commercially advanced flow-battery technology now in development, but it sets a rather high floor on the cost per kilowatt-hour at any scale. Other flow batteries contain precious metal electrocatalysts, such as the platinum used in fuel cells.<\/p>\n

The new flow battery developed by the Harvard team already performs as well as vanadium flow batteries, with chemicals that are significantly less expensive, and with no precious-metal electrocatalyst.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe whole world of electricity storage has been using metal ions in various charge states, but there is a limited number that you can put into solution and use to store energy, and none of them can economically store massive amounts of renewable energy,\u201d Gordon said. \u201cWith organic molecules, we introduce a vast new set of possibilities. Some of them will be terrible and some will be really good. With these quinones we have the first ones that look really good.\u201d<\/p>\n

Aspuru-Guzik noted that the project is very well aligned with the White House Materials Genome Initiative. \u201cThis project illustrates what the synergy of high-throughput quantum chemistry and experimental insight can do,\u201d he said. \u201cIn a very quick time period, our team homed in to the right molecule. Computational screening, together with experimentation, can lead to discovery of new materials in many application domains.\u201d<\/p>\n

Quinones are abundant in crude oil as well as in green plants. The molecule the Harvard team used in its first quinone-based flow battery is almost identical to one found in rhubarb. The quinones are dissolved in water, which prevents them from catching fire.<\/p>\n

To back up a commercial wind turbine, a large storage tank would be needed, possibly located in a below-grade basement, said co-lead author Michael Marshak, a postdoctoral fellow at SEAS and in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology. With a whole field of turbines or a large solar farm, one could imagine a few very large storage tanks.<\/p>\n

The same technology could also have applications at the consumer level, Marshak said. \u201cImagine a device the size of a home heating-oil tank sitting in your basement. It would store a day\u2019s worth of sunshine from the solar panels on the roof of your house, potentially providing enough to power your household from late afternoon, through the night, into the next morning, without burning any fossil fuels.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Harvard team\u2019s results published in Nature demonstrate an early, yet important technical achievement that could be critical in furthering the development of grid-scale batteries,\u201d said ARPA-E Program Director John Lemmon. \u201cThe project team\u2019s result is an excellent example of how a small amount of catalytic funding from ARPA-E can help build the foundation to hopefully turn scientific discoveries into low-cost, early-stage energy technologies.\u201d<\/p>\n

Team leader Aziz said the next steps in the project will be to further test and optimize the system that has been demonstrated on the benchtop and bring it toward a commercial scale. \u201cSo far, we\u2019ve seen no sign of degradation after more than 100 cycles, but commercial applications require thousands of cycles,\u201d he said. He also expects to achieve significant improvements in the underlying chemistry of the battery system. \u201cI think the chemistry we have right now might be the best that\u2019s out there for stationary storage and quite possibly cheap enough to make it in the marketplace,\u201d he said. \u201cBut we have ideas that could lead to huge improvements.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the end of the three-year development period, Connecticut-based Sustainable Innovations, LLC<\/a>, a collaborator on the project, expects to deploy demonstration versions of the organic flow battery contained in a unit the size of a horse trailer. The portable, scaled-up storage system could be hooked up to solar panels on the roof of a commercial building, and electricity from the solar panels could either directly supply the needs of the building or go into storage and come out of storage when needed. Sustainable Innovations anticipates playing a key role in the product\u2019s commercialization by leveraging its ultra-low-cost electrochemical cell design and system architecture already under development for energy storage applications.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou could theoretically put this on any node on the grid,\u201d Aziz said. \u201cIf the market price fluctuates enough, you could put a storage device there and buy electricity to store it when the price is low and then sell it back when the price is high. In addition, you might be able to avoid the permitting and gas-supply problems of having to build a gas-fired power plant just to meet the occasional needs of a growing peak demand.\u201d<\/p>\n

This technology could also provide very useful backup for off-grid rooftop solar panels \u2014 an important advantage considering some 20 percent of the world\u2019s population does not have access to a power distribution network.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe intermittent renewables storage problem is the biggest barrier to getting most of our power from the sun and the wind,\u201d Aziz said. \u201cA safe and economical flow battery could play a huge role in our transition off fossil fuels to renewable electricity. I\u2019m excited that we have a good shot at it.\u201d<\/p>\n

William Hogan<\/i>, Raymond Plank Professor of Global Energy Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and one of the world\u2019s foremost experts on electricity markets, is helping the team explore the economic drivers for the technology.<\/i><\/p>\n

Trent M. Molter, president and CEO of Sustainable Innovations, LLC, provides expertise on implementing the Harvard team\u2019s technology into commercial electrochemical systems.<\/i><\/p>\n\n\n<\/div>\n\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A team of Harvard scientists and engineers has demonstrated a new type of battery that could fundamentally transform the way electricity is stored on the grid, making power from renewable energy sources such as wind and sun far more economical and reliable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":105622744,"featured_media":151148,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"gz_ga_pageviews":15,"gz_ga_lastupdated":"2019-12-18 11:09","document_color_palette":"crimson","author":"Paul Karoff","affiliation":"SEAS Communications","_category_override":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1387],"tags":[3334,4768,7891,8543,11969,12335,12351,13050,37063,13458,23113,23832,23862,25571,26983,28500,29113,29171,30038,30621,30821,31686,32835,36014],"gazette-formats":[],"series":[],"class_list":["post-151100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science-technology","tag-alan-aspuru-guzik","tag-arpa-e","tag-chemistry","tag-climate","tag-electricity","tag-energy","tag-energy-storage","tag-fas","tag-federally-funded-research","tag-flow-battery","tag-materials-science","tag-michael-j-aziz","tag-michael-marshak","tag-news-hub","tag-paul-karoff","tag-quantum","tag-renewable-energy","tag-research","tag-roy-g-gordon","tag-school-of-engineering-and-applied-sciences","tag-seas","tag-solar","tag-sustainability","tag-wind"],"yoast_head":"\nBattery offers renewable energy breakthrough — Harvard Gazette<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"A team of Harvard scientists and engineers has demonstrated a new type of battery that could fundamentally transform the way electricity is stored on the grid, making power from renewable energy sources such as wind and sun far more economical and reliable.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/story\/2014\/01\/renewable-energy-breakthrough\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Battery offers renewable energy breakthrough — Harvard Gazette\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A team of Harvard scientists and engineers has demonstrated a new type of battery that could fundamentally transform the way electricity is stored on the grid, making power from renewable energy sources such as wind and sun far more economical and reliable.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/story\/2014\/01\/renewable-energy-breakthrough\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Harvard Gazette\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2014-01-08T18:00:41+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2019-04-01T19:44:28+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/michael-j-aziz6051.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"605\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"403\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"harvardgazette\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/story\/2014\/01\/renewable-energy-breakthrough\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/story\/2014\/01\/renewable-energy-breakthrough\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"harvardgazette\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/#\/schema\/person\/78d028cf624923e92682268709ffbc4b\"},\"headline\":\"Battery offers renewable energy breakthrough\",\"datePublished\":\"2014-01-08T18:00:41+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2019-04-01T19:44:28+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/story\/2014\/01\/renewable-energy-breakthrough\/\"},\"wordCount\":1525,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/story\/2014\/01\/renewable-energy-breakthrough\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/michael-j-aziz6051.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"Al\u00e1n Aspuru-Guzik\",\"ARPA-E\",\"Chemistry\",\"Climate\",\"electricity\",\"Energy\",\"energy storage\",\"FAS\",\"federally funded research\",\"flow battery\",\"materials science\",\"Michael J. 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storage\",\"fas\",\"federally funded research\",\"flow battery\",\"materials science\",\"michael j. aziz\",\"michael marshak\",\"news hub\",\"paul karoff\",\"quantum\",\"renewable energy\",\"research\",\"roy g. gordon\",\"school of engineering and applied sciences\",\"seas\",\"solar\",\"sustainability\",\"wind\"],\"dateCreated\":\"2014-01-08T18:00:41Z\",\"datePublished\":\"2014-01-08T18:00:41Z\",\"dateModified\":\"2019-04-01T19:44:28Z\"}<\/script>","tracker_url":"https:\/\/cdn.parsely.com\/keys\/news.harvard.edu\/p.js"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/michael-j-aziz6051.jpg","has_blocks":true,"block_data":{"0":{"blockName":"harvard-gazette\/article-header","attrs":{"blockColorPalette":"","coloredHeading":"","creditText":"Eliza Grinnell\/SEAS Communications","displayDetails":"","displayTitle":"","categoryId":1387,"mediaAlt":"","mediaCaption":"A metal-free flow battery that relies on the electrochemistry of naturally abundant, inexpensive, small organic (carbon-based) molecules was designed, built, and tested in the laboratory of SEAS Professor Michael J. Aziz (pictured).","mediaId":151148,"mediaSize":"full","mediaType":"image","mediaUrl":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/michael-j-aziz6051.jpg","poster":"","title":"Battery offers renewable energy breakthrough","subheading":"Harvard technology could economically store energy for use when the wind doesn\u2019t blow and the sun doesn\u2019t shine","centeredImage":true,"className":"is-style-full-width-text-below","mediaHeight":403,"mediaWidth":605,"backgroundFixed":false,"backgroundTone":"light","coloredBackground":false,"displayOverlay":true,"fadeInText":false,"isAmbient":false,"mediaLength":"","mediaPosition":"","posterText":"","titleAbove":false,"useUncroppedImage":false,"lock":[],"metadata":[]},"innerBlocks":[],"innerHTML":"<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img alt=\"\" height=\"403\" loading=\"eager\" src=\"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/michael-j-aziz6051.jpg\" width=\"605\"\/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\"><p class=\"wp-element-caption--caption\">A metal-free flow battery that relies on the electrochemistry of naturally abundant, inexpensive, small organic (carbon-based) molecules was designed, built, and tested in the laboratory of SEAS Professor Michael J. Aziz (pictured).<\/p><p class=\"wp-element-caption--credit\">Eliza Grinnell\/SEAS Communications<\/p><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","innerContent":["<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img alt=\"\" height=\"403\" loading=\"eager\" src=\"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/michael-j-aziz6051.jpg\" width=\"605\"\/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\"><p class=\"wp-element-caption--caption\">A metal-free flow battery that relies on the electrochemistry of naturally abundant, inexpensive, small organic (carbon-based) molecules was designed, built, and tested in the laboratory of SEAS Professor Michael J. Aziz (pictured).<\/p><p class=\"wp-element-caption--credit\">Eliza Grinnell\/SEAS Communications<\/p><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n"],"rendered":"<header\n\tclass=\"wp-block-harvard-gazette-article-header alignfull article-header is-style-full-width-text-below centered-image\"\n\tstyle=\" \"\n>\n\t<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img alt=\"\" height=\"403\" loading=\"eager\" src=\"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/michael-j-aziz6051.jpg\" width=\"605\"\/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\"><p class=\"wp-element-caption--caption\">A metal-free flow battery that relies on the electrochemistry of naturally abundant, inexpensive, small organic (carbon-based) molecules was designed, built, and tested in the laboratory of SEAS Professor Michael J. Aziz (pictured).<\/p><p class=\"wp-element-caption--credit\">Eliza Grinnell\/SEAS Communications<\/p><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\t<div class=\"article-header__content\">\n\t\t\t<a\n\t\t\tclass=\"article-header__category\"\n\t\t\thref=\"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/section\/science-technology\/\"\n\t\t>\n\t\t\tScience & Tech\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\n\t\t<h1 class=\"article-header__title wp-block-heading \">\n\t\tBattery offers renewable energy breakthrough\t<\/h1>\n\n\t\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\n\t<div class=\"article-header__meta\">\n\t\t<div class=\"wp-block-post-author\">\n\t\t\t<address class=\"wp-block-post-author__content\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<p class=\"author wp-block-post-author__name\">\n\t\tPaul Karoff\t<\/p>\n\t\t\t<p class=\"wp-block-post-author__byline\">\n\t\t\tSEAS Communications\t\t<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/address>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t\t<time class=\"article-header__date\" datetime=\"2014-01-08\">\n\t\t\tJanuary 8, 2014\t\t<\/time>\n\n\t\t<span class=\"article-header__reading-time\">\n\t\t\t8 min read\t\t<\/span>\n\t<\/div>\n\n\t\n\t\t\t<h2 class=\"article-header__subheading wp-block-heading\">\n\t\t\tHarvard technology could economically store energy for use when the wind doesn\u2019t blow and the sun doesn\u2019t shine\t\t<\/h2>\n\t\t\n<\/header>\n"},"2":{"blockName":"core\/group","attrs":{"templateLock":false,"metadata":{"name":"Article content"},"align":"wide","layout":{"type":"constrained","justifyContent":"center"},"tagName":"div","lock":[],"className":"","style":[],"backgroundColor":"","textColor":"","gradient":"","fontSize":"","fontFamily":"","borderColor":"","ariaLabel":"","anchor":""},"innerBlocks":[{"blockName":"core\/freeform","attrs":{"content":"","lock":[],"metadata":[]},"innerBlocks":[],"innerHTML":"\n\t\t<p>A team of Harvard scientists and engineers has demonstrated a new type of battery that could fundamentally transform the way electricity is stored on the grid, making power from renewable energy sources such as wind and sun far more economical and reliable.<\/p>\n<p>The novel battery technology is reported in a <a href=\"http:\/\/dx.doi.org\/10.1038\/nature12909\">paper<\/a> published in Nature on Jan. 9. Under the OPEN 2012 program, the Harvard team received funding from the U.S. Department of Energy\u2019s <a href=\"http:\/\/arpa-e.energy.gov\/\">Advanced Research Projects Agency \u2014 Energy (ARPA-E)<\/a> to develop the grid-scale battery, and plans to work with the agency to catalyze further technological and market breakthroughs over the next several years.<\/p>\n<p>The paper describes a metal-free flow battery that relies on the electrochemistry of naturally abundant, inexpensive, small organic (carbon-based) molecules called quinones, which are similar to molecules that store energy in plants and animals.<\/p>\n<p>The mismatch between the availability of intermittent wind or sunshine and the variable demand is the biggest obstacle to using renewable sources for a large fraction of our electricity. A cost-effective means of storing large amounts of electrical energy could solve this problem.<\/p>\n<p>The battery was designed, built, and tested in the laboratory of <a title=\"Michael J. Aziz\" href=\"https:\/\/www.seas.harvard.edu\/directory\/aziz\">Michael J. Aziz<\/a>, the Gene and Tracy Sykes Professor of Materials and Energy Technologies at the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.seas.harvard.edu\/\">Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences<\/a> (SEAS). <a href=\"http:\/\/faculty.chemistry.harvard.edu\/gordon\/pages\/roy-gordon\">Roy G. Gordon<\/a>, the Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Materials Science, led the work on the synthesis and chemical screening of molecules. <a href=\"http:\/\/aspuru.chem.harvard.edu\/\">Al\u00e1n Aspuru-Guzik<\/a>, professor of chemistry and chemical biology, used his pioneering high-throughput molecular screening methods to calculate the properties of more than 10,000 quinone molecules in search of the best candidates for the battery.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u201cImagine a device the size of a home heating-oil tank sitting in your basement. It would store a day\u2019s worth of sunshine from the solar panels on the roof of your house ...\" \u2014 Michael Marshak<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Flow batteries store energy in chemical fluids contained in external tanks, as with fuel cells, instead of within the battery container itself. The two main components \u2014 the electrochemical conversion hardware through which the fluids are flowed (which sets the peak power capacity) and the chemical storage tanks (which set the energy capacity) \u2014 may be independently sized. Thus the amount of energy that can be stored is limited only by the size of the tanks. The design permits larger amounts of energy to be stored at lower cost than with traditional batteries.<\/p>\n<p>By contrast, in solid-electrode batteries, such as those commonly found in cars and mobile devices, the power conversion hardware and energy capacity are packaged together in one unit and cannot be decoupled. Consequently they maintain peak discharge power for less than an hour before they are drained, and are therefore ill-suited to store intermittent renewables.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOur studies indicate that one to two days\u2019 worth of storage is required for making solar and wind dispatchable through the electrical grid,\u201d said Aziz.<\/p>\n<p>To store 50 hours of energy from a 1-megawatt power capacity wind turbine (50 megawatt-hours), for example, a possible solution would be to buy traditional batteries with 50 megawatt-hours of energy storage, but they would come with 50 megawatts of power capacity. Paying for 50 megawatts of power capacity when only 1 megawatt is necessary makes little economic sense.<\/p>\n<p>For this reason, a growing number of engineers have focused their attention on flow-battery technology. But until now, flow batteries have relied on chemicals that are expensive or hard to maintain, driving up the cost of storing energy.<\/p>\n<p>The active components of electrolytes in most flow batteries have been metals. Vanadium is used in the most commercially advanced flow-battery technology now in development, but it sets a rather high floor on the cost per kilowatt-hour at any scale. Other flow batteries contain precious metal electrocatalysts, such as the platinum used in fuel cells.<\/p>\n<p>The new flow battery developed by the Harvard team already performs as well as vanadium flow batteries, with chemicals that are significantly less expensive, and with no precious-metal electrocatalyst.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe whole world of electricity storage has been using metal ions in various charge states, but there is a limited number that you can put into solution and use to store energy, and none of them can economically store massive amounts of renewable energy,\u201d Gordon said. \u201cWith organic molecules, we introduce a vast new set of possibilities. Some of them will be terrible and some will be really good. With these quinones we have the first ones that look really good.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Aspuru-Guzik noted that the project is very well aligned with the White House Materials Genome Initiative. \u201cThis project illustrates what the synergy of high-throughput quantum chemistry and experimental insight can do,\u201d he said. \u201cIn a very quick time period, our team homed in to the right molecule. Computational screening, together with experimentation, can lead to discovery of new materials in many application domains.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Quinones are abundant in crude oil as well as in green plants. The molecule the Harvard team used in its first quinone-based flow battery is almost identical to one found in rhubarb. The quinones are dissolved in water, which prevents them from catching fire.<\/p>\n<p>To back up a commercial wind turbine, a large storage tank would be needed, possibly located in a below-grade basement, said co-lead author Michael Marshak, a postdoctoral fellow at SEAS and in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology. With a whole field of turbines or a large solar farm, one could imagine a few very large storage tanks.<\/p>\n<p>The same technology could also have applications at the consumer level, Marshak said. \u201cImagine a device the size of a home heating-oil tank sitting in your basement. It would store a day\u2019s worth of sunshine from the solar panels on the roof of your house, potentially providing enough to power your household from late afternoon, through the night, into the next morning, without burning any fossil fuels.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe Harvard team\u2019s results published in Nature demonstrate an early, yet important technical achievement that could be critical in furthering the development of grid-scale batteries,\u201d said ARPA-E Program Director John Lemmon. \u201cThe project team\u2019s result is an excellent example of how a small amount of catalytic funding from ARPA-E can help build the foundation to hopefully turn scientific discoveries into low-cost, early-stage energy technologies.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Team leader Aziz said the next steps in the project will be to further test and optimize the system that has been demonstrated on the benchtop and bring it toward a commercial scale. \u201cSo far, we\u2019ve seen no sign of degradation after more than 100 cycles, but commercial applications require thousands of cycles,\u201d he said. He also expects to achieve significant improvements in the underlying chemistry of the battery system. \u201cI think the chemistry we have right now might be the best that\u2019s out there for stationary storage and quite possibly cheap enough to make it in the marketplace,\u201d he said. \u201cBut we have ideas that could lead to huge improvements.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>By the end of the three-year development period, Connecticut-based <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sustainableinnov.com\/\">Sustainable Innovations, LLC<\/a>, a collaborator on the project, expects to deploy demonstration versions of the organic flow battery contained in a unit the size of a horse trailer. The portable, scaled-up storage system could be hooked up to solar panels on the roof of a commercial building, and electricity from the solar panels could either directly supply the needs of the building or go into storage and come out of storage when needed. Sustainable Innovations anticipates playing a key role in the product\u2019s commercialization by leveraging its ultra-low-cost electrochemical cell design and system architecture already under development for energy storage applications.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cYou could theoretically put this on any node on the grid,\u201d Aziz said. \u201cIf the market price fluctuates enough, you could put a storage device there and buy electricity to store it when the price is low and then sell it back when the price is high. In addition, you might be able to avoid the permitting and gas-supply problems of having to build a gas-fired power plant just to meet the occasional needs of a growing peak demand.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>This technology could also provide very useful backup for off-grid rooftop solar panels \u2014 an important advantage considering some 20 percent of the world\u2019s population does not have access to a power distribution network.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe intermittent renewables storage problem is the biggest barrier to getting most of our power from the sun and the wind,\u201d Aziz said. \u201cA safe and economical flow battery could play a huge role in our transition off fossil fuels to renewable electricity. I\u2019m excited that we have a good shot at it.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><i>William Hogan<\/i><i>, Raymond Plank Professor of Global Energy Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and one of the world\u2019s foremost experts on electricity markets, is helping the team explore the economic drivers for the technology.<\/i><\/p>\n<p><i>Trent M. Molter, president and CEO of Sustainable Innovations, LLC, provides expertise on implementing the Harvard team\u2019s technology into commercial electrochemical systems.<\/i><\/p>\n","innerContent":["\n\t\t<p>A team of Harvard scientists and engineers has demonstrated a new type of battery that could fundamentally transform the way electricity is stored on the grid, making power from renewable energy sources such as wind and sun far more economical and reliable.<\/p>\n<p>The novel battery technology is reported in a <a href=\"http:\/\/dx.doi.org\/10.1038\/nature12909\">paper<\/a> published in Nature on Jan. 9. Under the OPEN 2012 program, the Harvard team received funding from the U.S. Department of Energy\u2019s <a href=\"http:\/\/arpa-e.energy.gov\/\">Advanced Research Projects Agency \u2014 Energy (ARPA-E)<\/a> to develop the grid-scale battery, and plans to work with the agency to catalyze further technological and market breakthroughs over the next several years.<\/p>\n<p>The paper describes a metal-free flow battery that relies on the electrochemistry of naturally abundant, inexpensive, small organic (carbon-based) molecules called quinones, which are similar to molecules that store energy in plants and animals.<\/p>\n<p>The mismatch between the availability of intermittent wind or sunshine and the variable demand is the biggest obstacle to using renewable sources for a large fraction of our electricity. A cost-effective means of storing large amounts of electrical energy could solve this problem.<\/p>\n<p>The battery was designed, built, and tested in the laboratory of <a title=\"Michael J. Aziz\" href=\"https:\/\/www.seas.harvard.edu\/directory\/aziz\">Michael J. Aziz<\/a>, the Gene and Tracy Sykes Professor of Materials and Energy Technologies at the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.seas.harvard.edu\/\">Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences<\/a> (SEAS). <a href=\"http:\/\/faculty.chemistry.harvard.edu\/gordon\/pages\/roy-gordon\">Roy G. Gordon<\/a>, the Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Materials Science, led the work on the synthesis and chemical screening of molecules. <a href=\"http:\/\/aspuru.chem.harvard.edu\/\">Al\u00e1n Aspuru-Guzik<\/a>, professor of chemistry and chemical biology, used his pioneering high-throughput molecular screening methods to calculate the properties of more than 10,000 quinone molecules in search of the best candidates for the battery.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u201cImagine a device the size of a home heating-oil tank sitting in your basement. It would store a day\u2019s worth of sunshine from the solar panels on the roof of your house ...\" \u2014 Michael Marshak<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Flow batteries store energy in chemical fluids contained in external tanks, as with fuel cells, instead of within the battery container itself. The two main components \u2014 the electrochemical conversion hardware through which the fluids are flowed (which sets the peak power capacity) and the chemical storage tanks (which set the energy capacity) \u2014 may be independently sized. Thus the amount of energy that can be stored is limited only by the size of the tanks. The design permits larger amounts of energy to be stored at lower cost than with traditional batteries.<\/p>\n<p>By contrast, in solid-electrode batteries, such as those commonly found in cars and mobile devices, the power conversion hardware and energy capacity are packaged together in one unit and cannot be decoupled. Consequently they maintain peak discharge power for less than an hour before they are drained, and are therefore ill-suited to store intermittent renewables.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOur studies indicate that one to two days\u2019 worth of storage is required for making solar and wind dispatchable through the electrical grid,\u201d said Aziz.<\/p>\n<p>To store 50 hours of energy from a 1-megawatt power capacity wind turbine (50 megawatt-hours), for example, a possible solution would be to buy traditional batteries with 50 megawatt-hours of energy storage, but they would come with 50 megawatts of power capacity. Paying for 50 megawatts of power capacity when only 1 megawatt is necessary makes little economic sense.<\/p>\n<p>For this reason, a growing number of engineers have focused their attention on flow-battery technology. But until now, flow batteries have relied on chemicals that are expensive or hard to maintain, driving up the cost of storing energy.<\/p>\n<p>The active components of electrolytes in most flow batteries have been metals. Vanadium is used in the most commercially advanced flow-battery technology now in development, but it sets a rather high floor on the cost per kilowatt-hour at any scale. Other flow batteries contain precious metal electrocatalysts, such as the platinum used in fuel cells.<\/p>\n<p>The new flow battery developed by the Harvard team already performs as well as vanadium flow batteries, with chemicals that are significantly less expensive, and with no precious-metal electrocatalyst.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe whole world of electricity storage has been using metal ions in various charge states, but there is a limited number that you can put into solution and use to store energy, and none of them can economically store massive amounts of renewable energy,\u201d Gordon said. \u201cWith organic molecules, we introduce a vast new set of possibilities. Some of them will be terrible and some will be really good. With these quinones we have the first ones that look really good.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Aspuru-Guzik noted that the project is very well aligned with the White House Materials Genome Initiative. \u201cThis project illustrates what the synergy of high-throughput quantum chemistry and experimental insight can do,\u201d he said. \u201cIn a very quick time period, our team homed in to the right molecule. Computational screening, together with experimentation, can lead to discovery of new materials in many application domains.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Quinones are abundant in crude oil as well as in green plants. The molecule the Harvard team used in its first quinone-based flow battery is almost identical to one found in rhubarb. The quinones are dissolved in water, which prevents them from catching fire.<\/p>\n<p>To back up a commercial wind turbine, a large storage tank would be needed, possibly located in a below-grade basement, said co-lead author Michael Marshak, a postdoctoral fellow at SEAS and in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology. With a whole field of turbines or a large solar farm, one could imagine a few very large storage tanks.<\/p>\n<p>The same technology could also have applications at the consumer level, Marshak said. \u201cImagine a device the size of a home heating-oil tank sitting in your basement. It would store a day\u2019s worth of sunshine from the solar panels on the roof of your house, potentially providing enough to power your household from late afternoon, through the night, into the next morning, without burning any fossil fuels.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe Harvard team\u2019s results published in Nature demonstrate an early, yet important technical achievement that could be critical in furthering the development of grid-scale batteries,\u201d said ARPA-E Program Director John Lemmon. \u201cThe project team\u2019s result is an excellent example of how a small amount of catalytic funding from ARPA-E can help build the foundation to hopefully turn scientific discoveries into low-cost, early-stage energy technologies.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Team leader Aziz said the next steps in the project will be to further test and optimize the system that has been demonstrated on the benchtop and bring it toward a commercial scale. \u201cSo far, we\u2019ve seen no sign of degradation after more than 100 cycles, but commercial applications require thousands of cycles,\u201d he said. He also expects to achieve significant improvements in the underlying chemistry of the battery system. \u201cI think the chemistry we have right now might be the best that\u2019s out there for stationary storage and quite possibly cheap enough to make it in the marketplace,\u201d he said. \u201cBut we have ideas that could lead to huge improvements.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>By the end of the three-year development period, Connecticut-based <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sustainableinnov.com\/\">Sustainable Innovations, LLC<\/a>, a collaborator on the project, expects to deploy demonstration versions of the organic flow battery contained in a unit the size of a horse trailer. The portable, scaled-up storage system could be hooked up to solar panels on the roof of a commercial building, and electricity from the solar panels could either directly supply the needs of the building or go into storage and come out of storage when needed. Sustainable Innovations anticipates playing a key role in the product\u2019s commercialization by leveraging its ultra-low-cost electrochemical cell design and system architecture already under development for energy storage applications.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cYou could theoretically put this on any node on the grid,\u201d Aziz said. \u201cIf the market price fluctuates enough, you could put a storage device there and buy electricity to store it when the price is low and then sell it back when the price is high. In addition, you might be able to avoid the permitting and gas-supply problems of having to build a gas-fired power plant just to meet the occasional needs of a growing peak demand.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>This technology could also provide very useful backup for off-grid rooftop solar panels \u2014 an important advantage considering some 20 percent of the world\u2019s population does not have access to a power distribution network.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe intermittent renewables storage problem is the biggest barrier to getting most of our power from the sun and the wind,\u201d Aziz said. \u201cA safe and economical flow battery could play a huge role in our transition off fossil fuels to renewable electricity. I\u2019m excited that we have a good shot at it.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><i>William Hogan<\/i><i>, Raymond Plank Professor of Global Energy Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and one of the world\u2019s foremost experts on electricity markets, is helping the team explore the economic drivers for the technology.<\/i><\/p>\n<p><i>Trent M. Molter, president and CEO of Sustainable Innovations, LLC, provides expertise on implementing the Harvard team\u2019s technology into commercial electrochemical systems.<\/i><\/p>\n"],"rendered":"\n\t\t<p>A team of Harvard scientists and engineers has demonstrated a new type of battery that could fundamentally transform the way electricity is stored on the grid, making power from renewable energy sources such as wind and sun far more economical and reliable.<\/p>\n<p>The novel battery technology is reported in a <a href=\"http:\/\/dx.doi.org\/10.1038\/nature12909\">paper<\/a> published in Nature on Jan. 9. Under the OPEN 2012 program, the Harvard team received funding from the U.S. Department of Energy\u2019s <a href=\"http:\/\/arpa-e.energy.gov\/\">Advanced Research Projects Agency \u2014 Energy (ARPA-E)<\/a> to develop the grid-scale battery, and plans to work with the agency to catalyze further technological and market breakthroughs over the next several years.<\/p>\n<p>The paper describes a metal-free flow battery that relies on the electrochemistry of naturally abundant, inexpensive, small organic (carbon-based) molecules called quinones, which are similar to molecules that store energy in plants and animals.<\/p>\n<p>The mismatch between the availability of intermittent wind or sunshine and the variable demand is the biggest obstacle to using renewable sources for a large fraction of our electricity. A cost-effective means of storing large amounts of electrical energy could solve this problem.<\/p>\n<p>The battery was designed, built, and tested in the laboratory of <a title=\"Michael J. Aziz\" href=\"https:\/\/www.seas.harvard.edu\/directory\/aziz\">Michael J. Aziz<\/a>, the Gene and Tracy Sykes Professor of Materials and Energy Technologies at the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.seas.harvard.edu\/\">Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences<\/a> (SEAS). <a href=\"http:\/\/faculty.chemistry.harvard.edu\/gordon\/pages\/roy-gordon\">Roy G. Gordon<\/a>, the Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Materials Science, led the work on the synthesis and chemical screening of molecules. <a href=\"http:\/\/aspuru.chem.harvard.edu\/\">Al\u00e1n Aspuru-Guzik<\/a>, professor of chemistry and chemical biology, used his pioneering high-throughput molecular screening methods to calculate the properties of more than 10,000 quinone molecules in search of the best candidates for the battery.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u201cImagine a device the size of a home heating-oil tank sitting in your basement. It would store a day\u2019s worth of sunshine from the solar panels on the roof of your house ...\" \u2014 Michael Marshak<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Flow batteries store energy in chemical fluids contained in external tanks, as with fuel cells, instead of within the battery container itself. The two main components \u2014 the electrochemical conversion hardware through which the fluids are flowed (which sets the peak power capacity) and the chemical storage tanks (which set the energy capacity) \u2014 may be independently sized. Thus the amount of energy that can be stored is limited only by the size of the tanks. The design permits larger amounts of energy to be stored at lower cost than with traditional batteries.<\/p>\n<p>By contrast, in solid-electrode batteries, such as those commonly found in cars and mobile devices, the power conversion hardware and energy capacity are packaged together in one unit and cannot be decoupled. Consequently they maintain peak discharge power for less than an hour before they are drained, and are therefore ill-suited to store intermittent renewables.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOur studies indicate that one to two days\u2019 worth of storage is required for making solar and wind dispatchable through the electrical grid,\u201d said Aziz.<\/p>\n<p>To store 50 hours of energy from a 1-megawatt power capacity wind turbine (50 megawatt-hours), for example, a possible solution would be to buy traditional batteries with 50 megawatt-hours of energy storage, but they would come with 50 megawatts of power capacity. Paying for 50 megawatts of power capacity when only 1 megawatt is necessary makes little economic sense.<\/p>\n<p>For this reason, a growing number of engineers have focused their attention on flow-battery technology. But until now, flow batteries have relied on chemicals that are expensive or hard to maintain, driving up the cost of storing energy.<\/p>\n<p>The active components of electrolytes in most flow batteries have been metals. Vanadium is used in the most commercially advanced flow-battery technology now in development, but it sets a rather high floor on the cost per kilowatt-hour at any scale. Other flow batteries contain precious metal electrocatalysts, such as the platinum used in fuel cells.<\/p>\n<p>The new flow battery developed by the Harvard team already performs as well as vanadium flow batteries, with chemicals that are significantly less expensive, and with no precious-metal electrocatalyst.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe whole world of electricity storage has been using metal ions in various charge states, but there is a limited number that you can put into solution and use to store energy, and none of them can economically store massive amounts of renewable energy,\u201d Gordon said. \u201cWith organic molecules, we introduce a vast new set of possibilities. Some of them will be terrible and some will be really good. With these quinones we have the first ones that look really good.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Aspuru-Guzik noted that the project is very well aligned with the White House Materials Genome Initiative. \u201cThis project illustrates what the synergy of high-throughput quantum chemistry and experimental insight can do,\u201d he said. \u201cIn a very quick time period, our team homed in to the right molecule. Computational screening, together with experimentation, can lead to discovery of new materials in many application domains.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Quinones are abundant in crude oil as well as in green plants. The molecule the Harvard team used in its first quinone-based flow battery is almost identical to one found in rhubarb. The quinones are dissolved in water, which prevents them from catching fire.<\/p>\n<p>To back up a commercial wind turbine, a large storage tank would be needed, possibly located in a below-grade basement, said co-lead author Michael Marshak, a postdoctoral fellow at SEAS and in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology. With a whole field of turbines or a large solar farm, one could imagine a few very large storage tanks.<\/p>\n<p>The same technology could also have applications at the consumer level, Marshak said. \u201cImagine a device the size of a home heating-oil tank sitting in your basement. It would store a day\u2019s worth of sunshine from the solar panels on the roof of your house, potentially providing enough to power your household from late afternoon, through the night, into the next morning, without burning any fossil fuels.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe Harvard team\u2019s results published in Nature demonstrate an early, yet important technical achievement that could be critical in furthering the development of grid-scale batteries,\u201d said ARPA-E Program Director John Lemmon. \u201cThe project team\u2019s result is an excellent example of how a small amount of catalytic funding from ARPA-E can help build the foundation to hopefully turn scientific discoveries into low-cost, early-stage energy technologies.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Team leader Aziz said the next steps in the project will be to further test and optimize the system that has been demonstrated on the benchtop and bring it toward a commercial scale. \u201cSo far, we\u2019ve seen no sign of degradation after more than 100 cycles, but commercial applications require thousands of cycles,\u201d he said. He also expects to achieve significant improvements in the underlying chemistry of the battery system. \u201cI think the chemistry we have right now might be the best that\u2019s out there for stationary storage and quite possibly cheap enough to make it in the marketplace,\u201d he said. \u201cBut we have ideas that could lead to huge improvements.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>By the end of the three-year development period, Connecticut-based <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sustainableinnov.com\/\">Sustainable Innovations, LLC<\/a>, a collaborator on the project, expects to deploy demonstration versions of the organic flow battery contained in a unit the size of a horse trailer. The portable, scaled-up storage system could be hooked up to solar panels on the roof of a commercial building, and electricity from the solar panels could either directly supply the needs of the building or go into storage and come out of storage when needed. Sustainable Innovations anticipates playing a key role in the product\u2019s commercialization by leveraging its ultra-low-cost electrochemical cell design and system architecture already under development for energy storage applications.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cYou could theoretically put this on any node on the grid,\u201d Aziz said. \u201cIf the market price fluctuates enough, you could put a storage device there and buy electricity to store it when the price is low and then sell it back when the price is high. In addition, you might be able to avoid the permitting and gas-supply problems of having to build a gas-fired power plant just to meet the occasional needs of a growing peak demand.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>This technology could also provide very useful backup for off-grid rooftop solar panels \u2014 an important advantage considering some 20 percent of the world\u2019s population does not have access to a power distribution network.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe intermittent renewables storage problem is the biggest barrier to getting most of our power from the sun and the wind,\u201d Aziz said. \u201cA safe and economical flow battery could play a huge role in our transition off fossil fuels to renewable electricity. I\u2019m excited that we have a good shot at it.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><i>William Hogan<\/i><i>, Raymond Plank Professor of Global Energy Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and one of the world\u2019s foremost experts on electricity markets, is helping the team explore the economic drivers for the technology.<\/i><\/p>\n<p><i>Trent M. Molter, president and CEO of Sustainable Innovations, LLC, provides expertise on implementing the Harvard team\u2019s technology into commercial electrochemical systems.<\/i><\/p>\n"}],"innerHTML":"\n<div class=\"wp-block-group alignwide\">\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n","innerContent":["\n<div class=\"wp-block-group alignwide\">\n\n","\n\n<\/div>\n"],"rendered":"\n<div class=\"wp-block-group alignwide has-global-padding is-content-justification-center is-layout-constrained wp-block-group-is-layout-constrained\">\n\n\n\t\t<p>A team of Harvard scientists and engineers has demonstrated a new type of battery that could fundamentally transform the way electricity is stored on the grid, making power from renewable energy sources such as wind and sun far more economical and reliable.<\/p>\n<p>The novel battery technology is reported in a <a href=\"http:\/\/dx.doi.org\/10.1038\/nature12909\">paper<\/a> published in Nature on Jan. 9. Under the OPEN 2012 program, the Harvard team received funding from the U.S. Department of Energy\u2019s <a href=\"http:\/\/arpa-e.energy.gov\/\">Advanced Research Projects Agency \u2014 Energy (ARPA-E)<\/a> to develop the grid-scale battery, and plans to work with the agency to catalyze further technological and market breakthroughs over the next several years.<\/p>\n<p>The paper describes a metal-free flow battery that relies on the electrochemistry of naturally abundant, inexpensive, small organic (carbon-based) molecules called quinones, which are similar to molecules that store energy in plants and animals.<\/p>\n<p>The mismatch between the availability of intermittent wind or sunshine and the variable demand is the biggest obstacle to using renewable sources for a large fraction of our electricity. A cost-effective means of storing large amounts of electrical energy could solve this problem.<\/p>\n<p>The battery was designed, built, and tested in the laboratory of <a title=\"Michael J. Aziz\" href=\"https:\/\/www.seas.harvard.edu\/directory\/aziz\">Michael J. Aziz<\/a>, the Gene and Tracy Sykes Professor of Materials and Energy Technologies at the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.seas.harvard.edu\/\">Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences<\/a> (SEAS). <a href=\"http:\/\/faculty.chemistry.harvard.edu\/gordon\/pages\/roy-gordon\">Roy G. Gordon<\/a>, the Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Materials Science, led the work on the synthesis and chemical screening of molecules. <a href=\"http:\/\/aspuru.chem.harvard.edu\/\">Al\u00e1n Aspuru-Guzik<\/a>, professor of chemistry and chemical biology, used his pioneering high-throughput molecular screening methods to calculate the properties of more than 10,000 quinone molecules in search of the best candidates for the battery.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u201cImagine a device the size of a home heating-oil tank sitting in your basement. It would store a day\u2019s worth of sunshine from the solar panels on the roof of your house ...\" \u2014 Michael Marshak<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Flow batteries store energy in chemical fluids contained in external tanks, as with fuel cells, instead of within the battery container itself. The two main components \u2014 the electrochemical conversion hardware through which the fluids are flowed (which sets the peak power capacity) and the chemical storage tanks (which set the energy capacity) \u2014 may be independently sized. Thus the amount of energy that can be stored is limited only by the size of the tanks. The design permits larger amounts of energy to be stored at lower cost than with traditional batteries.<\/p>\n<p>By contrast, in solid-electrode batteries, such as those commonly found in cars and mobile devices, the power conversion hardware and energy capacity are packaged together in one unit and cannot be decoupled. Consequently they maintain peak discharge power for less than an hour before they are drained, and are therefore ill-suited to store intermittent renewables.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOur studies indicate that one to two days\u2019 worth of storage is required for making solar and wind dispatchable through the electrical grid,\u201d said Aziz.<\/p>\n<p>To store 50 hours of energy from a 1-megawatt power capacity wind turbine (50 megawatt-hours), for example, a possible solution would be to buy traditional batteries with 50 megawatt-hours of energy storage, but they would come with 50 megawatts of power capacity. Paying for 50 megawatts of power capacity when only 1 megawatt is necessary makes little economic sense.<\/p>\n<p>For this reason, a growing number of engineers have focused their attention on flow-battery technology. But until now, flow batteries have relied on chemicals that are expensive or hard to maintain, driving up the cost of storing energy.<\/p>\n<p>The active components of electrolytes in most flow batteries have been metals. Vanadium is used in the most commercially advanced flow-battery technology now in development, but it sets a rather high floor on the cost per kilowatt-hour at any scale. Other flow batteries contain precious metal electrocatalysts, such as the platinum used in fuel cells.<\/p>\n<p>The new flow battery developed by the Harvard team already performs as well as vanadium flow batteries, with chemicals that are significantly less expensive, and with no precious-metal electrocatalyst.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe whole world of electricity storage has been using metal ions in various charge states, but there is a limited number that you can put into solution and use to store energy, and none of them can economically store massive amounts of renewable energy,\u201d Gordon said. \u201cWith organic molecules, we introduce a vast new set of possibilities. Some of them will be terrible and some will be really good. With these quinones we have the first ones that look really good.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Aspuru-Guzik noted that the project is very well aligned with the White House Materials Genome Initiative. \u201cThis project illustrates what the synergy of high-throughput quantum chemistry and experimental insight can do,\u201d he said. \u201cIn a very quick time period, our team homed in to the right molecule. Computational screening, together with experimentation, can lead to discovery of new materials in many application domains.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Quinones are abundant in crude oil as well as in green plants. The molecule the Harvard team used in its first quinone-based flow battery is almost identical to one found in rhubarb. The quinones are dissolved in water, which prevents them from catching fire.<\/p>\n<p>To back up a commercial wind turbine, a large storage tank would be needed, possibly located in a below-grade basement, said co-lead author Michael Marshak, a postdoctoral fellow at SEAS and in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology. With a whole field of turbines or a large solar farm, one could imagine a few very large storage tanks.<\/p>\n<p>The same technology could also have applications at the consumer level, Marshak said. \u201cImagine a device the size of a home heating-oil tank sitting in your basement. It would store a day\u2019s worth of sunshine from the solar panels on the roof of your house, potentially providing enough to power your household from late afternoon, through the night, into the next morning, without burning any fossil fuels.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe Harvard team\u2019s results published in Nature demonstrate an early, yet important technical achievement that could be critical in furthering the development of grid-scale batteries,\u201d said ARPA-E Program Director John Lemmon. \u201cThe project team\u2019s result is an excellent example of how a small amount of catalytic funding from ARPA-E can help build the foundation to hopefully turn scientific discoveries into low-cost, early-stage energy technologies.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Team leader Aziz said the next steps in the project will be to further test and optimize the system that has been demonstrated on the benchtop and bring it toward a commercial scale. \u201cSo far, we\u2019ve seen no sign of degradation after more than 100 cycles, but commercial applications require thousands of cycles,\u201d he said. He also expects to achieve significant improvements in the underlying chemistry of the battery system. \u201cI think the chemistry we have right now might be the best that\u2019s out there for stationary storage and quite possibly cheap enough to make it in the marketplace,\u201d he said. \u201cBut we have ideas that could lead to huge improvements.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>By the end of the three-year development period, Connecticut-based <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sustainableinnov.com\/\">Sustainable Innovations, LLC<\/a>, a collaborator on the project, expects to deploy demonstration versions of the organic flow battery contained in a unit the size of a horse trailer. The portable, scaled-up storage system could be hooked up to solar panels on the roof of a commercial building, and electricity from the solar panels could either directly supply the needs of the building or go into storage and come out of storage when needed. Sustainable Innovations anticipates playing a key role in the product\u2019s commercialization by leveraging its ultra-low-cost electrochemical cell design and system architecture already under development for energy storage applications.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cYou could theoretically put this on any node on the grid,\u201d Aziz said. \u201cIf the market price fluctuates enough, you could put a storage device there and buy electricity to store it when the price is low and then sell it back when the price is high. In addition, you might be able to avoid the permitting and gas-supply problems of having to build a gas-fired power plant just to meet the occasional needs of a growing peak demand.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>This technology could also provide very useful backup for off-grid rooftop solar panels \u2014 an important advantage considering some 20 percent of the world\u2019s population does not have access to a power distribution network.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe intermittent renewables storage problem is the biggest barrier to getting most of our power from the sun and the wind,\u201d Aziz said. \u201cA safe and economical flow battery could play a huge role in our transition off fossil fuels to renewable electricity. I\u2019m excited that we have a good shot at it.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><i>William Hogan<\/i><i>, Raymond Plank Professor of Global Energy Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and one of the world\u2019s foremost experts on electricity markets, is helping the team explore the economic drivers for the technology.<\/i><\/p>\n<p><i>Trent M. Molter, president and CEO of Sustainable Innovations, LLC, provides expertise on implementing the Harvard team\u2019s technology into commercial electrochemical systems.<\/i><\/p>\n\n\n<\/div>\n"}},"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":185873,"url":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/story\/2016\/07\/a-battery-inspired-by-vitamins\/","url_meta":{"origin":151100,"position":0},"title":"A battery inspired by vitamins","author":"harvardgazette","date":"July 18, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"Harvard researchers have developed a new class of battery electrolyte material based on vitamin B2 that could enable large-scale, inexpensive electricity storage for renewable power sources.","rel":"","context":"In "Science & Tech"","block_context":{"text":"Science & Tech","link":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/section\/science-technology\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/flow_battery_605.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/flow_battery_605.jpg?resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/flow_battery_605.jpg?resize=525%2C300 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":200825,"url":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/story\/2006\/06\/harvard-to-purchase-renewable-energy-credits\/","url_meta":{"origin":151100,"position":1},"title":"Harvard to purchase renewable energy credits","author":"gazetteimport","date":"June 15, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"Harvard University announced on June 13 that it will enter into an agreement with the town of Hulls municipal light department to purchase the renewable energy credits (RECs) generated by the 1.8 megawatt Hull wind turbine for a 10-year period.","rel":"","context":"In "Campus & Community"","block_context":{"text":"Campus & Community","link":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/section\/campus-community\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":174049,"url":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/story\/2015\/09\/green-storage-for-green-energy-grows-cleaner\/","url_meta":{"origin":151100,"position":2},"title":"Green storage for green energy grows cleaner","author":"harvardgazette","date":"September 24, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"Harvard scientists and engineers have demonstrated an improved flow battery that can store electricity from intermittent energy sources. The battery contains nontoxic compounds, inexpensive materials, and can be cost-effective for both residential and commercial use.","rel":"","context":"In "Science & Tech"","block_context":{"text":"Science & Tech","link":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/section\/science-technology\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/seas_battery1_605.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/seas_battery1_605.jpg?resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/seas_battery1_605.jpg?resize=525%2C300 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":21937,"url":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/story\/2009\/09\/china-energy-needs-wind\/","url_meta":{"origin":151100,"position":3},"title":"China could meet its energy needs by wind alone","author":"harvardgazette","date":"September 10, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"A team of environmental scientists from Harvard and Tsinghua University has demonstrated the enormous potential for wind-generated electricity in China.","rel":"","context":"In "Science & Tech"","block_context":{"text":"Science & Tech","link":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/section\/science-technology\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/09\/043007_mcelroy_dr_013.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/09\/043007_mcelroy_dr_013.jpg?resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/09\/043007_mcelroy_dr_013.jpg?resize=525%2C300 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":174003,"url":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/story\/2015\/09\/greening-the-electric-grid-with-gas-turbines\/","url_meta":{"origin":151100,"position":4},"title":"Greening the electric grid with gas turbines","author":"harvardgazette","date":"September 23, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"A new Harvard study pokes holes in the belief that huge quantities of storage will be needed before clean, renewable sources can make a significant dent in greenhouse-gas emissions from electricity generation.","rel":"","context":"In "Science & Tech"","block_context":{"text":"Science & Tech","link":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/section\/science-technology\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/121610_features_107_605.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/121610_features_107_605.jpg?resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/121610_features_107_605.jpg?resize=525%2C300 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":29147,"url":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/story\/2009\/11\/harvard-to-become-largest-institutional-buyer-of-wind-power-in-new-england\/","url_meta":{"origin":151100,"position":5},"title":"Harvard to become largest institutional buyer of wind power in New England","author":"harvardgazette","date":"November 2, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Harvard University announced today (Nov. 2) that more than 10 percent of the electricity consumed on its Cambridge and Allston campuses soon will be supplied from a wind farm in northern Maine","rel":"","context":"In "Campus & Community"","block_context":{"text":"Campus & Community","link":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/section\/campus-community\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/105622744"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=151100"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151100\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":269900,"href":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151100\/revisions\/269900"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/151148"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=151100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=151100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=151100"},{"taxonomy":"format","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/gazette-formats?post=151100"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=151100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}