Breakthrough: Scientists make ‘solar flow battery’ to store electricity

Despite solar energy gaining more and more popularity, it still can’t power a home entirely on its own since the solar panels don’t store energy for later. Scientists are now trying to overcome that by designing a new device.

Though solar energy is an eco-friendly and a renewable source, it can’t make a house free from the grid. Researchers from UAE and Saudi Arabia have thus made a device called ‘solar flow battery’ that can harvest and store solar energy for later use, which can maybe one day bring electricity to the rural and underdeveloped areas.

In the study published in the journal Chem, scientists explained that in an attempt to improve solar cells, they created an integrated battery that works in three various ways. As per the lead author Song Jin, it can work like a traditional solar cell that converts sunlight to electricity immediately, it can store the solar energy, or it can also be charged like a normal battery, reported The Verge.

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The device is a combination of two prevailing technologies, solar cells that harvest light, and a flow battery. Flow batteries store energy in external liquid tanks, as compared to the usual lithium-ion batteries that store energy in solid materials.

“Compared with separated solar energy conversion and electrochemical energy storage devices, combining the functions of separated devices into a single, integrated device could be a more efficient, scalable, compact, and cost-effective approach to utilizing solar energy,” said Jin.

Working on the battery for years, Jin and his team claim to have reached 14.1% efficiency now, more efficient than any other integrated device currently present. Jin has dubbed it as ‘round-trip efficiency’; the efficiency from taking that energy, storing it and discharging it. “We can probably get to 20% efficiency in the next few years, and I think 25% round-trip is not out of the question.”

These batteries could also help reduce costs in the future, as believed by Jin. The team further plans to enhance the device’s design in order to make them more practical.

Moreover, as reported by Science Daily, researchers believe that this solar flow battery can help surpass the limitation of electrical grid by making electricity more readily available to people living in rural areas and giving an alternative source of energy when the usual ones fail.