10
votes
Saltwater batteries. A large scale environmentaly friendly energy storage solution?
Link information
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- Title
- Power at sea: Towards high-performance seawater batteries: Scientists develop an efficient synthesis route to produce a novel co-doped anode material for rechargeable seawater batteries
- Word count
- 497 words
This article is full of spam links...? Doesn't exactly scream trustworthy to me.
Yeah it's rather bad. I treated it more like a jumping off point
Edit: The Link has now been switched to a different (better) one.
Original Comment:
I don't think I'm qualified to comment on the feasibility of saltwater batteries without additional research, but I'm a bit weary of your source and would not rely on it as a primary source if I were you:
That being said I would also be interested in knowing more about this technology and having someone more qualified comment on what is the actual state of the art and what is exaggeration driven by marketing interests.
Oh yeah, i'm aware the article is not the best, but this was literally my first time hearing about it, hence the interest.
I just stumbled into this article and I'm currently doing some more research, but it sounds like an amazig thing. No heavy or rare metals? Easy to produce? Sounds really cool! I just ask myself how really inefficient they are and thus how much of a CO2 footprint they have compared to the alternatives. What do you think?
There’s a Wikipedia article on sodium ion batteries, which is roughly what this seems to be about? It’s not actually sea water; the article just creatively relabeled “sodium perchlorate solution electrolyte” — you can’t slap a couple metal rods into the ocean and call it a day, afaict. Overall it’s not clear that this cell chemistry is a standout competitor, and there’ve been a couple failed attempts at commercializing it. It’d be nice to have more chemistries available to better target different niches (eg. grid level storage) overall, though.
Yeah, i've read a little more and it seems to still require stuff like manganese electrodes, and the salt itsel is not sodium chloride but sodium sulfide. It doesn't seem to be as straightforward as i thought.
Their efficiency is low, but everyone is overconcerned about that, because the main use case for a lot of these storage solutions is storing mass quantities of electricity that would otherwise go to waste.
These things can be built with multiple MW capacity for cheap. As a way to absorb excess capacity there are few safer, cheaper options.
In-line text advertisements? Really?
In any case I have no confidence in this battery technology for the simple reason that liquid batteries in general just kind of suck. There is a reason why after solid batteries came to market that the liquid ones have largely faded away. The liquid state introduces complications that make them less reliable generally speaking.
Here's a better jumping off point for sodium and seawater battieries:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/01/220131153302.htm
There's a lot of other research to be found in the 'related articles' section. While solid batteries are great, they don't scale really well for large, industrial scale. Saltwater batteries are huge and heavy, but they show promise because they are fire/explosion proof, and can scale very quickly if mobility is not a concern.
I wouldn't expect to see saltwater batteries in cars ever, and unlikely in on-grid homes. But as a fixture in powerplants, especially along the coast? You betcha.
Switched the link out for this one, as it was causing undue distraction to the discussion.
Of course they wouldn't work in cars; they're way too big! And the size and weight are just some of the major problems. Liquid batteries tend to be very thouroughly sealed because if any vapor can escape, it will, and then you have a broken battery. So for large scale, you would typically need to actually assemble the battery from it's components in it's final place, which means you need to build a very durable container for it. Depending on the exact chemistry, it may need to be vented. And then they need maintenance; the anodes need to be replaced, the cathodes need descaling, and the liquid inside will need to be replaced as well, and that liquid may not be safe to just pour down the drain.
I'm not saying they're useless, of course, just that they're not ideal except in some fairly specific situations. Some of these issues can be engineered away (though that usually means a tradeoff somewhere else) and the methods in this study look like a marked improvement over liquid batteries I've dealt with in the past.
While the topic is certainly interesting, this particular link is extremely low-quality. It reeks of AI composition and translation, apparently misrepresents the technology it's actually referring to, and is loaded with randomly placed spam links.