TECH

Built battery 100 times cheaper and stores twice as much energy
The new battery is presented today in the US magazine Joule and was developed by a group of scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), encouraged by the US Department of Energy to reduce the cost of storage of energy renewable energy sources.Designers say it can accumulate twice the energy of a normal lead and acid battery."It is increasingly clear that for renewable energy to become the main part, if not the only, part of our electricity generation system," we must combine supply with the demand we have as a society, said one of the researchers, Yet-Ming Chiang, from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT.The official said that the invention gives new hope in this area but added that it is necessary to walk quickly because there is "not much time".The critical part of renewable energies is variability, since clouds can prevent the sun from reaching solar panels or there may be no wind to move the wind turbines. If the energy could be stored it would be possible to maintain an uninterrupted supply flow in these non-production times.So far, the link between storage and renewable energy generation is incipient. Saving this energy is possible but the amount of stored solar and wind energy produced is negligible and the cost is very high.Former Energy Secretary Steven Chu had set the 5-5-5 goal of five times the cost of storage and five times the capacity to collect, all in five years. 

The researchers were interested in the potential of sulfur, an abundant non-metal, and after research reached the battery they now present, with a chemical cost of about one dollar per kilowatt hour.
So far, they also note, the only drawback of the battery is that it takes up more space than the traditional batteries on the market, which is offset by the low cost.
The team promises to continue working to make the battery more efficient and extend its lifespan, estimated now in two months, when the normal would be between five and 20 years.

Lusa