Electricity demand has to be in constant balance with electricity supplied - this is the large scale problem Donald Sadoway wants to solve in this TED Talk.
The constraints of this problem are immense. A solution would need to generate incredibly high power, have a long service life and come at a very low cost.
Energy storage is the solution. Giant batteries could address the problem of intermittency that prevents wind and solar from contributing to the grid like a coal burning power plant.
Sadoway knows that battery science is straightforward and that the first battery was simple. Alessandro Volta's invention in the early 1800s only required two electrodes, metals of different compositions, and an electrolyte.
http://www.ted.com/talks/donald_sadoway_the_missing_link_to_renewable_energy.html
Sadoway hired students and taught them to think about the problem the way that he does. Then he turned the students loose on the problem.
Aluminum production provided the inspiration that Donald needed. Aluminum is produced with a huge economy of scale, combining liquid metal and molten salt at high temperatures allowing a current to be sent through the mixture.
This became the idea starter for the liquid metal battery, using molten magnesium as the top layer, antimony on the bottom and molten salt in between.
http://turbinegenerator.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Inside-the-liquid-metal-battery1.jpg
Through research at MIT, the battery designs evolved from a shot glass-sized cell storing 1 Watt-hour to a saucer-sized cell storing 200 Watt-hours. Sadoway started his own company to produce larger batteries that will stack to fill a forty foot shipping container.
These large scale batteries would contain 2 MegaWatt-hours, enough energy to meet the daily needs of two hundred American homes.
www.ambri.com
This project has grid-level storage, operates silently, and is emission free. The batteries have no moving parts and can be remotely controlled. Everything was designed to the low price point of the energy market.
Sadoway broke away from several mainstream ideas for this project. High temperatures, low production volumes, and using students instead of battery scientists are all departures from the norm. And it’s working.
Sadoway is a wonderful speaker. Watch the video when you have a few minutes. Until then, here are a few of his most quotable one-liners from the TED Talk:
To get ourselves out of the energy crisis we need to invent ourselves out of it.
If you want to make something dirt cheap, make it out of dirt.
One of the greatest benefits of being a professor? Colored chalk.
We choose to work on grid level storage not because it is easy, but because it is hard.