As one of the most important developments in recent times, the ‘Cryobattery’ has been seen as a major solution to how we can store energy. The battery aims to find a way of making sure that we can store energy as a form of liquid air. However, the Cryobattery has been a very long-term project, having been worked on by Rob Morgan. Morgan, a professor at the University of Brighton, believes that his tool could be used to store liquified air at -196C.
A plant that is using the technology now looks set to try it out as they try and power 50,000 homes in the northern part of England using the Cryobattery system. This could be a major step forward not only for this kind of technology, but for a long-term solution to safe, efficient energy storage moving forward.
Morgan was speaking about the technology, and said that it could be used to store power from the wind farms near Sussex. Speaking about his latest find, Morgan said: “Wind and solar farms sometimes produce excess energy, for instance, at night or during hot weather,
“Storing it as liquid air means it can be heated and turned back into a gas to drive turbines which generate electricity when demand increases. I believe this technology can go a long way to helping tackle the UK’s and, indeed, the world’s energy shortage. We could be talking about a £1 billion industry in the future with 20,000 jobs in the UK alone.”
By using this process, we would be able to store energy in liquid air as opposed to storing it in a chemical compound as we do with a normal battery. This would mean that we could be using the power that is stored, turning it into a potential energy. Morgan continued, saying: “Think if you had a weight on a piece of string,” he explained.
“If you wind it up on a wheel and let it go, you’re releasing potential energy. What we’re using in the CRYOBattery is using the difference in temperature between the liquid and air temperature to store potential energy.”
This method is cheaper and can be used at a larger scale than conventional batteries, Prof Morgan said.
“When you start making batteries, they don’t start getting cheaper the bigger they are. If you build a battery 100 times bigger, it will likely be 100 times the cost. But because this technology uses pumps and tanks, all things you’d find in a power station, it actually gets cheaper the bigger it is.”
With interest already being shown by major firms in the industry such as Japanese giants Sumitumo Heavy Industries, this could be on the market much sooner than we would have assumed. The aim is to use the energy in a way that would allow for a more renewable program set by companies. We are in a position where we need to cut down on our usage of non-renewable energy sources ASAP; tools such as the Cryobattery might be just what we need to achieve that.
Citations
https://www.theargus.co.uk/news/18304460.new-green-technology-can-store-energy-liquid-air/