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Next page >> 1 By Doug Peeples
SGN News Editor
No, we're not making any claims or endorsements here and some of the technologies might sound as if they came out of a cocktail party conversation among chemists and engineers. But they are interesting.
It almost goes without saying that one of the biggest obstacles in the smart grid's way is coming up with a truly successful grid-scale energy storage. It's considered a must if variable sources of renewable energy like wind and solar are to be integrated into the grid. We're trying everything: all manner of battery technologies, ice, compressed air, flywheels, pumped hydropower, salt and thermal to name a few of the more and less popular. Here are a couple of new contenders.
A nano what for energy storage?
In an earlier story, we told you about graphene, an amazing substance that is a couple hundred times stronger than steel, but three million sheets of it would give you a stack one millimeter thick. Turns out researchers at Rice University literally stumbled onto what they're calling a nanocable, a tiny coaxial cable of small copper wires coated with a thin layer of carbon. Made with techniques first used in the relatively new field of graphene research, the materials scientists at Rice found that the cable could make an outstanding capacitor. Without going into a lengthy explanation of capacitance, let's just say a capacitor made with nanocable would have about 10 times the charge density of current capacitors. Among other things, the nanocable could be an important step toward next generation energy storage.
"We didn't expect to create this when we started," said Jun Lou, a co-author of a study on the process and associate professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at Rice. "At the outset, we were just curious to see what would happen electrically and mechanically if we took small copper wires known as interconnects and covered them with a thin layer of carbon."
Their kilowatt-hour nickel-zinc battery now costs about $300 to $500 and is expected to drop to $200 as the technology gets better. Compare that figure to $1,200 per kilowatt-hour for lithium ion. A storage system using 200 nickel-zinc batteries would cost about $100,000, with a life cycle of up to 15 years, the engineers say.
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