Although wind and solar energy projects are growing, a remaining challenge, largely due to cost, is storing electric power for days when the air is still or when the sun goes down. Now researchers with ETH Zürich’s Laboratory of Inorganic Chemistry, Department of Chemistry and Applied
Biosciences (Zürich, Switzerland) and the Laboratory for Thin Films and Photovoltaics, Empa—Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (Dübendorf, Switzerland) are developing a new battery that uses low-cost materials—sodium and magnesium—that could bring the price of renewable electricity storage to more affordable levels. Currently, lithium-ion batteries are the storage technology of choice for many applications, but the cost for large-scale storage may be prohibitive. To make larger-scale energy storage more accessible, Maksym V. Kovalenko and colleagues wanted to develop an affordable alternative to lithium-ion.
The researchers started with magnesium as the battery's safe, inexpensive, and high-energy density anode material and paired it with pyrite, which is made of iron and sulfur, as the cathode. The electrolyte contains sodium and magnesium ions. Testing showed that the resulting device's energy density was close to that of lithium-ion batteries. It could get an additional two- to three-fold boost with further development of magnesium electrolytes. And because it's made with low-cost materials, it could one day help support grid-scale energy storage, the researchers say. Source: American Chemical Society, acs.org.
