This promises: new battery is 100x cheaper and stores twice as much power

In 2012, still under Barack Obama's government, then-energy secretary Stephen Chu proposed a challenge for companies in the sector. Named 5-5-5, this challenge was looking for a solution that delivered a 5% reduction in energy expenditure, a 5-fold increase in energy capacity, and all in 5 years or less. It seems that we finally have a candidate up to this challenge.

A new battery presented in the US magazine "Joule" promises to be one hundred times cheaper than a conventional battery and can save up to twice as much power. The solution was presented by a group of scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT. The program was encouraged by the US Department of Energy and really looks promising.

Promising

Based on the use of sulfur, air, water and salt, the system not only has twice the capacity of lead and acid batteries, but also uses compounds that can be found in abundance in nature, which would greatly reduce the production cost of this battery. component.

"It is becoming increasingly clear that for renewable energy to become the main, if not the only, part of our electricity generation system, we need to match supply with the demand we have as a society, " Yet-Ming Chiang said., one of the scientists from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT.

Chiang points out that the solution gives the industry new hope, but stresses that action needs to be taken quickly. For her, unfortunately “not so long ago”.

But for this battery to become a reality, researchers need to deal with two problems. The first of these is size, as it is much larger than the compact power sources we have today - which may even be offset by the cost. The other obstacle is the useful life, which today is estimated at 2 months, when the normal would be between 5 and 20 years.

To know the technical details of this battery, as well as its complete operation, in this link you will find the article published in Joule.