Not clear from the very fluffy press release how one gets this pyrimidone to start releasing enough energy to boil water while it maintains 60% better energy density than lithium ion batteries.
I’d personally want to understand that before making any big plans, but this sounds cool.
"Upon treatment with acid, that bond breaks to release more than a megajoule per kilogram of the compound, enough to rapidly boil water from a solution."
That's from the editor's summary (I haven't had time to read the paper).
> When exposed to a trigger -- such as a small amount of heat or a catalyst -- the molecule snaps back into its original form, releasing the stored energy as heat.
From the paper abstract, the catalyst is HCl. I don't have access to the full paper, so I don't know how they separate the HCl from the MOST to neutralize it to be rechargeable again.
From what I've seen of the paper, it seems like the catalyst is needed for a full energy release reaction. Regular batteries also have rapid energy release with unintended contamination of a chemical (water), and we still generally have no problems during regular usage.
The reaction triggered by heat doesn't release all the stored energy, which would be the bigger concern for unintended runaway reactions.
As a sibling comment says, in the paper the catalyst is acid and I can't find the release using heat in the paper. Is that an hallucination in the press article?
(Note: At high enough temperature the thermal energy will be high enough to go over the energy wall from the high energy isometric to the normal one. So it's plausible. But with high enough temperatures a lot of nasty things can happen, like total decomposition or just burning. So it may not be a good strategy to make a rechargable baterry.)
It sure would be nice to see some way to harness all this energy falling around us. I'd far prefer to just catch a few rays to charge my toys than plug into some far distant machine.
I remember thinking, in my youth, that the technology that enabled CASIO calculation would one day be applied as well to a bigger Turing machine, but I'm yet to see a solar-powered computer.
I sure wish it'd happen, though. All these magic solar energy storage/conversion systems need to start showing up on SOM/SOC's, imho ..
I have a consumer motion-triggered camera that is armed 24/7 and records for 30 seconds after each trigger. It has WiFi and serves playback itself, as well as of course video encoding. It's probably running Linux though i haven't verified.
It runs off a 25cm square solar panel screwed to a wall that only receives direct illumination for 5 hours a day, and is not in any way optimised beyond 'that looks roughly like it's pointing at the sun'.
I think I saw an apple A16 takes about 8 watts, which would be about a square foot of solar panel. So assuming we keep making progress it doesn’t seem insane to me that a laptop where the back of the lcd is a solar panel would be enough?
Angle though isn't ideal, unless the PV panel pops off the lid so you can position it better (and still be able to open the screen far enough back to read - though that's often not great in bright sun). I remember the OLPC could be run by hoisting a bucket of sand or water up on a rope and pulley on a tree branch and letting it drive a small generator as that came back down - and that was almost 20yr ago).
vim in a terminal could reduce overhead significantly, but if you need a browser for anything you're kind of hosed because they're so inefficient on the whole
Neither the press release nor the research paper abstract provide the only number that matters: the energy efficiency.
The energy stored per mass has little importance for a stationary system. What matters is the energy loss when the solar energy is stored into this chemical compound, instead of being converted directly by photovoltaic cells.
There are 2 losses, before storage only a part of the incoming solar energy is eventually stored into chemical bonds, the rest being either converted into heat or not absorbed.
The second loss is when the energy is recovered. As it seems that the temperature that can be attained when extracting the stored energy is very low, the efficiency of conversion into other forms of energy will also be very low.
In the absence of more precise information, this does not seem competitive with synthesizing hydrocarbons for long term energy storage, either in energy efficiency or in energy density, but only in the initial cost of the equipment, which is true only for now, as the living beings prove that synthesizing hydrocarbons from hydrogen generated with solar energy could be done at a very low cost.
Because of the inherent very low efficiency of using this to generate electrical energy, the abstract of the research paper suggests as possible uses only "on-demand heat delivery for water heating, cooking, and surface defrosting".
This may be useful, but far more useful is to use another method of energy storage that can be used for anything, not only for such limited applications. For myself, such a solution could provide only warm water for washing. For cooking, I would want my microwave oven, and I would also want my computers to work, so it would not make sense to invest in such a thing, instead of in a battery that could cover all my energy needs. Only if the energy efficiency from the incoming solar energy into the heat used to make hot water were significantly greater than when passing through photovoltaic cells and a battery, such a system could be useful to provide heating and warm water to a building, allowing for smaller batteries to cover the other energy consumption.
> There are 2 losses, before storage only a part of the incoming solar energy is eventually stored into chemical bonds, the rest being either converted into heat or not absorbed.
Capturing some heat as non-heat still would make a house less warm in summer.
> The second loss is when the energy is recovered. As it seems that the temperature that can be attained when extracting the stored energy is very low, the efficiency of conversion into other forms of energy will also be very low
If you use it to heat a house in winter, wouldn’t losses be very low?
(Since you say “For myself, such a solution could provide only warm water for washing”, that use case doesn’t apply to you, but many people do need to heat their houses in winter)
> The energy stored per mass has little importance for a stationary system
For the use case I mentioned above, I think it matters. If you want to store heat for 6 months and then extract it, the volume/mass needed will be significant.
There also is a third loss: between the time you store the energy and the time you extract it. Many batteries have relatively high self-discharge (Google says 1-3% per month for Lithium-ion)
_If_ this does away with most of those losses, it could be competitive even though it is less efficient at capturing heat.
Having said that, this product probably has too low an energy density for that. Dry wood has ballpark ten times the energy per kg as modern batteries, but even for that, you need quite a bit of volume to warm a house in winter.
> If you use it to heat a house in winter, wouldn’t losses be very low?
Usually you can do something like light->electricity->battery[x]->electricity->heatpump->heat. The efficient in the heatpump is like 300%, i.e. for every 1 Joule stored in the battery, the heatpump extracts 2 Joules from the ambient and sends 3 Joules of heat inside your home.
This device is something like light->bath[y]->heat.
If you assume both get the same amount of light, it's misleading to compare the energy stored in battery[x] and bath[y], because the first has a magic x3 later that comes from the heat pump. This sods not depends on the exact setup, but it's an important difference between "work" and "heat" in a thermal machine.
Energy efficiency is far from the only number that matters. Unless you are that rare person who is talking about total life time cost in energy terms.
You have to consider the cost of manufacturing, the cost of disposal, the cost of maintenance, possible externalities such as pollution of the environment, etc.
Something like 25% of global energy is dedicated to industrial heating. While not as immediately applicable as electricity, there are many uses for load shifting solar as heat.
That being said, there are some "hot rocks" companies who have been working with thermoptovoltaic cells. Which could still work, but the low hanging fruit is in the millions of direct uses for heat.
"Seasonal storage" is a problem so far out that it feels like it's not even worth worrying about until renewables are a much higher percentage of the overall energy mix. What I mean by this is that even places that (for example) have a huge abundance of solar power during the day still have to burn fossil fuels when it's nighttime or when it's cloudy - solving the "24 hour problem" will still take a lot more renewable capacity than we currently have.
And even then, we already have the ability to create synthetic fuels from electricity, so any new development would need to be competitive with what we can already do.
I disagree! It's a vital problem to solve, especially if solar becomes significantly cheaper than wind (as appears to be happening; solar has the better experience rate). And solving it punctures one of the last arguments bad-faith nuclear advocates use to argue against renewables.
I will once again point to Austin Vernon and Standard Thermal, which has an approach that could truly solve the problem. The first principles analysis of the issue shows the problem with "sand batteries" and the like.
"Given that heat capacities of solids are all generally similar at ~3kb per atom, we’d need to store heat in a solid that costs ~$10-30/ton or less and tolerates very high temps. But nothing built on a foundation or made in a factory is sold for less than $100/ton. There’s almost nothing that even gets shipped in the dollar per ton range."
> Still, if it could be stored stably in the summer and converted to heat in the winter then possibly helpful.
The capex per unit of stored energy in undoubtedly far too high for that to be worthwhile. Seasonal energy storage requires extremely low cost storage media.
"When exposed to a trigger -- such as a small amount of heat or a catalyst -- the molecule snaps back into its original form, releasing the stored energy as heat."
That's a bit concerning. Runaway waiting to happen.
there are a huge number of things that can store energy, chemicaly ,and reversibly, but the gotchas are always lurking, exotic wildly expensive ingedients, dangerous failure modes , or very complicated operational requirements that will not scale into the real world.
this anouncent makes clear that is is based on dna, which is no surprise as nature is the ancient master of chemical energy storage,and which all of us useing right now
anyway
I’d personally want to understand that before making any big plans, but this sounds cool.