• Energy storage breakthroughs on the horizon

    Charlie Riedel / AP

    In this file photo, a group of 260-foot-high wind towers are silhouetted against a bright orange sky at the Elk River Wind farm near Beaumont, Kan. Massive integration of wind power to the electric grid will take breakthroughs in energy storage technologies.

    By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News

    Breakthroughs in energy storage technologies are on the horizon that could turn vast swathes of the world's sun-soaked deserts and windy plains into sources of clean, renewable energy, according to experts focused on our energy future.

    No one technology — ranging from storing a portion of the sun's energy collected during the day in molten salt to run solar thermal generators at night to banks of lithium-ion batteries scattered around neighborhoods — will be the solution.

    Rather, "there is going to be a portfolio of energy storage" options, Bruce Dunn, a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of California at Los Angeles, told me Thursday. 

    Dunn is the lead author of a review paper in this week's issue of the journal Science that explores the prospects for three battery technologies to become cheap, reliable and efficient enough for wide-scale deployment on the electric power grid.

    Battery breakthroughs
    Lithium-ion battery technology, for example, is enjoying a boost in research and development for the electrical vehicle market that is driving down manufacturing costs. Utilities will piggyback on those improvements and may even be able to use EVs to store excess wind and solar energy, he noted.

    Other technologies such as redox-flow batteries are relatively new and unproven. "On paper it looks to be very inexpensive," he said, but there's very little experience using them at the scale utilities need.

    The batteries are based on the use of liquid electrolytes stored in tanks and pumped through a reactor to produce energy. 

    As it stands now, there's plenty known about how the batteries work on the small scale, but not much about how they work on large scale. Will they maintain the right power levels? Will there be corrosion problems?

    Answers to such questions should start to come within three or four years with preliminary results from demonstration projects supported by the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy and the Department of Energy.

    "It's an experiential thing, there's no way around it. You've got to build big stuff," Dunn said. "And those things are built and they are being tested. That's the good news."

    Sodium-sulfur batteries, the third technology in the Science review, are already in limited use by utilities around the world, including Japan where they are sold commercially, but the technology is costly, Dunn said. Manufacturing prices have to fall before they can be embraced.

    In time, he said, prices will fall, just as they have for technologies such as personal computers. And as prices for big, utility-scale batteries fall, they'll be incorporated onto the electric grid, allowing the integration of renewable sources of power such as wind and solar.

    The use of batteries on the grid will also reduce the need to construct generation capacity that sits idle most of the time but puts off excess emissions of greenhouse gases as they are cycled up and down to meet peak demands, the researchers note.

    Hydrogen storage
    Another way to store energy is in the form of hydrogen, which has long been eyed for the fuel cells that some believe will power most cars in the future. A hurdle is how to cheaply and efficiently get hydrogen, which is abundant but almost always bound to something else.

    One solution may come from researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who are working on so-called artificial leaf technology that splits water into bubbles of oxygen and hydrogen. The hydrogen can be stored and used to power fuel cells.

    Questions remain about how efficient the system is and how inexpensively they can generate hydrogen, notes Robert Service in a news story about the technology in Science. 

    One study, he noted, found that hydrogen can be produced from natural gas about half as cheaply using a mature technology called steam reforming than the best-case scenarios envisioned for the artificial leaf technologies.

    "That's not saying artificial photosynthesis isn't worth pursuing – only that fossil fuels are the leading energy source for a reason and they won't be easy to dethrone," he writes.

    More bang for the fossil fuel buck
    Eric Wachsman, a sustainable energy researcher at the University of Maryland, argues that technological improvements are making fuel cells that run on all types of fuels, including conventional fuels such as gasoline, in addition to hydrogen, a viable option everywhere from power grids to transportation.

    In separate Science review article, he explains that the breakthrough comes from new electrolyte materials that allow solid oxide fuel cells to be operated at lower temperatures.

    Solid oxide fuel cells such as Bloom Energy's device that was rolled out last year, he told me, have a power density of about 0.2 watts per square centimeter while operating at about 950 degrees Celsius. His team has developed a solid oxide fuel cell that gets 2 watts per square centimeter at 650 degrees Celsius.

    "It is an order of magnitude higher power density at a much lower temperature," he said, adding that his team has also developed electrolytes that make operation at 350 degrees Celsius viable.

    And if solid oxide fuel cells can operate at lower temperatures, they become attractive for use in transportation where using a fuel cell to power a car is two and a half to three times more efficient than using fuel to run an internal combustion engine, he noted.

    Wachsman is hoping the government will continue to support research in solid oxide fuel cell technology to help bring down the costs and scale up the technology, though noted the prospects are grim.

    "There is no funding for solid oxide fuel cells in the current DOE budget," he said.

    The dearth of government funding for energy innovation is taken up by Bill Gates, Microsoft chairman and co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, in a Science editorial that plugs his call to increase R&D spending from $5 billion to $16 billion a year.

    "History has repeatedly proven that federal investments in research return huge payoffs with incredible associated benefits for U.S. industries and the economy," he writes. "Yet over the past three decades, U.S. government investment in energy innovation has dropped by more than 75 percent."

    Without further government investment, will the needed breakthroughs in energy storage remain on the horizon?

    More stories about energy technology:

    John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

    As the over-65 population expands, new gadgets and systems will allow seniors to live at home and receive improved healthcare. From sleep-sensing beds to robots piloted by grandchildren, we look at how "health surveillance" can improve quality of life.

     

  • Can fuel cells power the future?

    Justin Sullivan / Getty Images file

    A reporter photographs an installation of "Bloom Box" energy servers at eBay's headquarters in San Jose, Calif., during the unveiling of the fuel-cell system in February. Other ventures are getting into the fuel-cell field as well.

    An electricity-generating fuel-cell system known as the Bloom Box sparked a huge buzz in the energy debate six months ago - and since then, still more ventures have surfaced to promise better living through chemistry. Will future fuel cells make good on those promises? We should know in the next couple of years.

    One of the concepts, detailed today at an American Chemical Society meeting in Boston, combines the environmental friendliness of solar power with the 24/7 capability of fuel-cell generation. When the sun shines, electricity from solar panels would feed into a personal power grid, and also split water into hydrogen and oxygen. When the sun isn't out, the hydrogen and oxygen can be recombined to keep the electricity flowing, producing pure water in the process.

    "Our goal is to make each home its own power system," Daniel Nocera, a chemist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explained in a news release discussing the system. "We're working toward development of 'personalized' energy units that can be manufactured, distributed and installed inexpensively. There certainly are major obstacles to be overcome - existing fuel cells and solar cells must be improved, for instance. Nevertheless, one can envision villages in India and Africa not long from now purchasing an affordable basic system."

    Nocera and his colleagues started out with the water-splitting side of the equation. They found a more efficient way to convert H2O into hydrogen and oxygen, using relatively inexpensive catalysts that contain cobalt and nickel. And it doesn't need to be pure H2O. "Owing to the self-healing properties of the catalysts, these electrolyzers can use any water source," including seawater, waste water or water from the Charles River in Boston, the researchers say.

    They contend that their system eliminates the need for expensive platinum catalysts - which would make the economics of fuel cells much more attractive. Prototype water-splitting systems have been built at a cost of $30 each, operating at power levels of 100 watts. The ACS news release says the catalytic system has been licensed to Sun Catalytix, an MIT commercial spin-off, and the venture aims to make super-efficient electrolyzers available for homes and small businesses within two years.

    Fuel cell system

    Patrick Gillooly / MIT

    A new catalyst could help speed development of inexpensive home-brewed solar energy systems for powering homes and plug-in cars during the day (left) and for producing electricity from a fuel cell at night (right).

    As Nocera noted, the big issues surrounding this system have to do with the costs for the other components: Putting solar panels on your home could cost tens of thousands of dollars, although government subsidies can reduce the price dramatically. In order to get Nocera's make-it-yourself electricity system out to villages in the developing world, the devices to turn the hydrogen into energy would also have to become cheaper and more efficient.

    The Bloom Box is just one of the devices that has generated excitement among energy experts. It's generated electricity as well, in pilot projects at places ranging from eBay to Safeway. Bloom Energy's 100-kilowatt "server" converts natural gas and air into electricity, producing water and carbon dioxide in the process (CH4+2O2 is turned into 2H2O+CO2).

    There are still a couple of worrisome factors about that equation, however: First, the Bloom Box is powered by natural gas. The energy conversion factor (50 percent efficiency or better) compares with the best rates for gas-fired power plants, but it's still a fossil fuel. There are still carbon dioxide emissions as well, although the carbon footprint is not as great as it would be for a gas-fired plant.

    Wyoming-based NDCPower is working on a different approach: It's developing fuel cells that could take in biofuels - say, ethanol, methanol, butanol or even biodiesel that's converted to alcohol - and produce chemicals with industrial applications on the other side, along with the electricity.

    "Our technology is the only existing technology that allows you to take a carbon-based fuel and make energy, and produce no CO2," the company's president and chief executive officer, Don Montgomery, told me during a recent sitdown.

    The byproducts could range from acetic acid (which is used to make plastics and currently costs $400 a ton or more) to formic acid (a silage preservative that's even more expensive). Montgomery figures that the sale of chemicals produced by the NDCPower fuel cells, plus the no-CO2 angle, could win them some extra attention in the developing fuel-cell marketplace.

    The key is in the chemicals used to make the fuel conversion - a recipe that Montgomery and his colleagues aren't talking publicly about, except in the broadest terms. "You basically take your ethanol and pour it into Dran-O," he joked. Dan Buttry, a chemistry professor at Arizona State University who also serves as NDCPower's chief technology officer, would say only that the secret ingredient is "not platinum."

    Buttry also told me that the NDCPower fuel cell doesn't need a membrane - which is a plus, because in most fuel cells, the membrane "is a pretty big component of the cost."

    Right now, NDCPower's main business is providing military-grade power systems to the, um, U.S. military. But the company is aiming to make its mark in the civilian power market as well. And that market is just getting revved up. "The development curve has been like stepping on a rocket ship," Montgomery told me.

    Fuel-cell technology isn't quite ready to reach orbit yet, and there are some big questions yet to be answered: Will the increased efficiency make up for the higher cost of fuel-cell devices? What's the right scale for fuel cells? Will we want to have a fuel cell in every garage (or in every hand, or every pacemaker), or does it make more sense to have big fuel-cell "servers" in office buildings or next-generation power plants? What'll it take to get to the vision of a "power plant in every home," as sketched out today by MIT's Nocera. You tell me, in the comment section below.

    More fuel-cell ventures making news on the Web:

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