New battery tech from MIT and others

[Finishline42]

As the world builds out ever larger installations of wind and solar power systems, the need is growing fast for economical, large-scale backup systems to provide power when the sun is down and the air is calm. Today’s lithium-ion batteries are still too expensive for most such applications, and other options such as pumped hydro require specific topography that’s not always available.

Now, researchers at MIT and elsewhere have developed a new kind of battery, made entirely from abundant and inexpensive materials, that could help to fill that gap.

The new battery architecture, which uses aluminum and sulfur as its two electrode materials, with a molten salt electrolyte in between, is described today in the journal Nature, in a paper by MIT Professor Donald Sadoway, along with 15 others at MIT and in China, Canada, Kentucky, and Tennessee.

snip

The research team included members from Peking University, Yunnan University and the Wuhan University of Technology, in China; the University of Louisville, in Kentucky; the University of Waterloo, in Canada; Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in Tennessee; and MIT. The work was supported by the MIT Energy Initiative, the MIT Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation, and ENN Group.

More detailed explanation of the battery at the link

https://news.mit.edu/2022/aluminum-sulfur-battery-0824

[Ferrets are Cool]

1. I am always interested in new battery tech.

[Finishline42]

2. IMO the advancement of battery tech

is the key to a renewable energy future.

[old guy]

5. Absolutely.

[Shermann]

3. I WAS interested

...until the "new battery tech" videos became the scourge of YouTube.

China's All New Battery Breakthrough SHOCKS American Scientists

This New Magnesium Battery SHOCKS the Entire Car Industry

General Motors INSANE NEW Ultium Battery SHOCKS The Entire Car Industry

Fords INSANE NEW Lithium Phosphate Battery SHOCKS Entire Car Industry

Scientists Reveal Absurd Nuclear Battery & SHOCKS The Entire World!

What's shocking is how science and technology channels have become a shit show.

[Finishline42]

4. Agree - click bait

But it doesn't change the process of people/companies developing new and better ways to store energy.

[Shermann]

6. The article is interesting

They've only tested for hundreds of cycles. Large industrial scale installations will probably require tens of thousands or more. What are you supposed to do with this big mass of worn-out solidified salt?

[Ferrets are Cool]

8. That is very true. I have stopped clicking.

[Crowman2009]

7. I heard about this before on an episode of Nova.

These batteries are perfect for fixed locations such as wind farms and solar arrays. Unlike lithium, the manufacturing centers don't need strict temperature or humidity controls to operate.

[NNadir]

9. A molten salt battery?!? Really? We're saved?!?

A battery is a device that wastes energy. Now it is true that this energy waste is reflected by something called "heat."

One of the more fun things as people die all over the planet from extreme heat, as crops fail, as rivers disappear, as vast stretches of forest burn is to hear people pretend that there's fucking excess solar and wind energy to store.

There isn't.

The fucking Germans are burning coal. Lots of it.

Now we're going to melt sulfur with heat - from where isn't specified, maybe we'll trash 50 hectares of land with in air bird fryer solar cells to run the battery for an hour or two - for those very, very, very, very, very rare instances where so called "renewable energy" actually produces a slight excess of energy.

In 2020, the entire solar and wind industry, after the waste of trillions of dollars, produced just over 10 exajoules of energy on a planet consuming 584 exajoules with the proportion of dangerous fossil fuels rising, not falling.

I have an idea! Let's look at another of the tens of thousands of University Press releases of this type, and not give a fuck about what's happening in the world right now. Everything will be great.

We'll melt some sulfur out in the desert and declare victory.

If one types the words aluminum, sulfur and battery into Google Scholar, one gets in less than a second around 60,000 hits.

Here, from just one from 1976:

Electrochemical studies on sulfur and sulfides in aluminum chloride-sodium chloride melts Knut A. Paulsen and Robert A. Osteryoung Journal of the American Chemical Society 1976 98 (22), 6866-6872

Another from 1997:

Aluminum Anodic Behavior in Aqueous Sulfur Electrolytes Stuart Licht, James R. Jeitler, and Jin H. Hwang The Journal of Physical Chemistry B 1997 101 (25), 4959-4965

2017:

High-Performance Aluminum-Ion Battery with CuS@C Microsphere Composite Cathode Shuai Wang, Shuqiang Jiao, Junxiang Wang, Hao-Sen Chen, Donghua Tian, Haiping Lei, and Dai-Ning Fang ACS Nano 2017 11 (1), 469-477

I could go on all night with this, but we'd still not shake the delusional nonsense of taking academic press releases as some kind of indication of reality.

This is news? Life saving news? Really?

I couldn't begin to count the number of battery papers I've come across in the last few years with the word "sulfur" in the title.

A battery is a device that wastes energy. Given that all forms of energy have an environmental impact, especially the solar and wind industries given they they require expensive, wasteful, and environmentally odious redundancy, we need to use energy efficiently

There are zero thermodynamic nightmares, energy storage systems, that will make wind and solar reliable, affordable, just or clean.

Zero.

They're worthless. How do I know? I notice that 50 years of hype about them, most designed to attack the only carbon free reliable and sustainable energy, has done nothing, zero, zip, to prevent the planet from ending up in flames.

One should spend less time on the MIT press releases and just open any news feed and search the world "wildfire." I realize fantasies may ameliorate the horror of reality, but still, if we give a shit about the world, reality should be "where it's at."

Sulfur batteries burning in run away fires - not that they are ever going to be industrially widespread given the thousands of papers written on the subject for no result - won't be pretty.

When sulfur burns, both SO2 and SO3 gas are produced. These are extremely toxic pollutants, and a part of the reason that coal is killing the planet while we all wait, decade after decade after decade after decade after decade for the grand "renewable energy" nirvana that did not come, is not here, and won't come.

People are dying from extreme heat. Crops are failing in extreme droughts. Glaciers on which billions of people depend upon for water are disappearing. Do the people hyping this crap give a shit or are we all still watching Saturday morning superhero cartoons?