The following guest post is by Neil Kane, president of Illinois Partners, who specializes in bringing research innovations to market.
The scientific press is abuzz with an April 13, 2014, paper in Nature Chemistry, which describes research performed at Harvard and MIT that would allow one to capture solar energy during the day when the sun is shining and then discharge it at night as heat. Although it’s off to a promising start, will this innovation be able to overcome the many challenges associated with gaining market adoption for a new technology?
It doesn’t take a Ph.D. from Harvard to understand that the biggest problem with solar power is that the sun doesn’t always shine. Because solar power is intermittent, you can’t do useful work with electricity generated from it if you require a steady and reliable source of energy. But if you had a way to store energy as it is generated, with all its intermittency, and then mete it out as needed, it would make solar energy generation much more viable. The same logic holds for wind energy which is also intermittent.
The electrical grid is marvelous at moving energy from place to place. Energy storage allows you to move energy in time. There are many approaches toward storing energy. They range from lithium-ion batteries to larger scale appliances called flow batteries to rotating flywheels to hydroelectric dams to storing huge amounts of pressurized air in underground caverns. In all cases the scheme is to store energy when the generation is cheap (when demand is low…like at night) and then discharge when demand (and prices) are high. Because energy storage will have such a positive effect on the adoption of renewable energy, a big race is on among entrepreneurs and corporations worldwide to develop better ways to store energy. But even when the core technology works, major impediments exist toward the market adoption of new technologies. I’ve learned this first hand. Many times.
I spent about eight months last year working to commercialize an energy storage appliance called a flow battery on behalf of a research institute. What I learned bespeaks the difficulty of bring new types of energy storage to market.
For one, the device, in whatever form it takes, has to be reliable. It doesn’t matter how cheap it is nor how “green”. If the electricity delivery system were as reliable as cell phone networks are today, civilization as we know it would grind to a halt.
Of course energy storage devices have to be safe. While this sounds obvious, this requirement eliminates many otherwise promising technologies. If it isn’t safe, it’s game over.
It has to be affordable. That means, its deployment has to have a positive return-on-investment relative to whatever exists today. Solar panels, for instance, even today still don’t deliver electricity as cheaply as your electrical utility…even in high cost states like California. Government subsidies and tax credits make up the difference, although some people may choose to pay more to help contribute to saving the environment.
If the technology can’t be manufactured at large scale, then what use is it? It has to be available, deployable and serviceable in many places around the world at the same time.
It has to be able to be transported easily since not all applications for energy storage are right near the factories that make them. In the case of the MIT innovation, as we shall see, the most probable markets are in developing countries where there isn’t already a reliable electric grid. It is unlikely that those countries have the infrastructure to manufacture the energy storage devices.
By the same token, for technology to be deployable in developing countries, it has to be easy to use, can’t require sophisticated infrastructure and has to be engineered so that it can be repaired easily.
Which is why this potential breakthrough from Harvard and MIT is causing such commotion. The researchers have described (or invented) a new class of materials called photoswitches. Photoswitches are molecules that can assume two different shapes. Like with a battery, to make the shape morph in one direction uses energy (i.e., light). If you let them go in the other direction, they discharge that energy as heat. What is amazing is that they claim that these photoswitches are very stable over time. That is, unlike batteries which eventually discharge whether you use them or not (everyone with a cell phone knows this), photoswitches are stable and you can cycle them many times. The vision is that you could trap solar energy during the day, and then release it as heat during the evening to power a stove or heat water. Photoswitches are, in essence, rechargeable thermal batteries.
This technology is most useful in places where they don’t already have a reliable electrical grid. Imagine if instead of burning wood (or manure) at night to cook your food, heat your dwelling or boil your water, you could do that with a contraption that captured that energy during the day for free. This would be an enormous breakthrough. The efficiency of photoswitches is not high enough to discharge electricity like a battery. But for providing a source of heat, this looks very promising.
Only time will tell whether photoswitches will be the answer for cheap energy/heat storage and whether they can be turned into a robust platform that meets all of the demands of the market—which can be brutally unforgiving at times. To justify further development, however, you need a compelling vision, really promising technology, funding and a bunch of smart people. So far so good.
