Texas Engineers: We Might Double Renewable Energy Storage Capacities
Researchers at the University of Texas (UT) at Austin say they might have found an improved way to store energy that could make wind and solar power installations wildly more efficient.
Using a one-atom thick, carbon-based material known as graphene, the research team says it has already matched the energy storage capacities of today’s ultracapacitors. Eventually, their calculations show, graphene sheets could store twice as much energy as a standard ultracapacitor.
We currently have two main ways to store electrical energy: in batteries and in ultracapacitors. Finding an effective way to store large amounts of energy is critical for making the most of renewable energy sources like sun and wind, which deliver variable — rather than constant and steady — amounts of energy.
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While they’re not yet as widely known as batteries, ultracapacitors are lighter, more flexible, last longer and deliver higher power capacity. Graphene capacitors could make those benefits even greater.
“There are reasons to think that the ability to store electrical charge can be about double that of current commercially used materials,” says Rod Ruoff, a mechanical engineering professor and a physical chemist at UT. “We are working to see if that prediction will be borne out in the laboratory.”
Ruoff adds, “Graphene’s surface area of 2630 m2/gram (almost the area of a football field in about 1/500th of a pound of material) means that a greater number of positive or negative ions in the electrolyte can form a layer on the graphene sheets resulting in exceptional levels of stored charge,”
Boosting the energy storage capacity for wind energy alone offers tremendous potential. Ruoff points out that, if wind-energy production would keep growing at the 45 percent annual rate it did last year, wind could, over the next 20 years, almost rival the power of all energy sources used in 2007.
“While it is unlikely that such explosive installation and use of wind can continue at this growth rate for 20 years, one can see the possibilities, and also ponder the issues of scale,” Ruoff says. “Electrical energy storage becomes a critical component when very large quantities of renewable electrical energy are being generated.”
In addition to boosting the efficiency of renewable energy installations, graphene-based capacitors could also improve the efficiency and performance of electric and hybrid vehicles, cell phones and even office copiers.
