Long gone are the days when light bulbs simply shine in the darkness. Now they can also report their own energy usage, get brighter when people walk by, and even tell you when the conference room is available at work. Light-emitting diodes, also known as LEDs, interact with sensors, microcomputers and other components to offer a long […]
Let There Be (Connected) Light
Long gone are the days when light bulbs simply shine in the darkness. Now they can also report their own energy usage, get brighter when people walk by, and even tell you when the conference room is available at work. Light-emitting diodes, also known as LEDs, interact with sensors, microcomputers and other components to offer […]
Battery Based On PNNL Tech Given EPA Green Chemistry Award
A Washington state company that produces a battery based on technology developed at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has been honored with a Green Chemistry Challenge Award, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced. UniEnergy Technologies – which is also known as UET, was founded in 2012, and has a 60,000 square-foot manufacturing facility near Seattle, Wash. […]
Seeing The Forest And The Trees To Find Parasitic Reactions In Batteries
Everyone’s heard the phrase about seeing both the details and the big picture, and that struggle comes into sharp relief for those studying how to create batteries that hold more energy and cost less. It’s difficult to see the details of atomic and topographical changes as a battery operates. For DOE’s Joint Center for Energy Storage […]
Video Captures Bubble-Blowing Battery In Action
With about three times the energy capacity by weight of today’s lithium-ion batteries, lithium-air batteries could one day enable electric cars to drive farther on a single charge. But the technology has several holdups, including losing energy as it stores and releases its charge. If researchers could better understand the basic reactions that occur as […]
Coming Together, Falling Apart, And Starting Over, Battery Style
Whether inside your laptop computer or storing energy outside wind farms, we need high-capacity, long-lasting, and safe batteries. In batteries, as in any electrochemical device, critical processes happen where the electrolyte and active material meet at the solid electrode. However, determining what happens at the meeting point has been difficult because in addition to active […]
Cleaning Up Hybrid Battery Electrodes Improves Capacity And Lifespan
Hybrid batteries that charge faster than conventional ones could have significantly better electrical capacity and long-term stability when prepared with a gentle-sounding way of making electrodes. Called ion soft-landing, the high-precision technique resulted in electrodes that could store a third more energy and had twice the lifespan compared to those prepared by a conventional method, […]
Cleaning Up Hybrid Battery Electrodes Improves Capacity, Lifespan
Hybrid batteries that charge faster than conventional ones could have significantly better electrical capacity and long-term stability when prepared with a gentle-sounding way of making electrodes. Called ion soft-landing, the high-precision technique resulted in electrodes that could store a third more energy and had twice the lifespan compared to those prepared by a conventional method, […]
New Flow Battery Offers Lower-Cost Energy Storage
Energy storage system owners could see significant savings from a new flow battery technology that is projected to cost 60 percent less than today’s standard flow batteries. The organic aqueous flow battery, described in a paper published in the journal Advanced Energy Materials, is expected to cost $180 per kilowatt-hour once the technology is fully developed. The […]
Enlisting Distributed Energy Devices to Balance the Power Grid
The electric grid has to balance power supply and demand nearly in real-time, requiring power plants to be adjusted on a second-by-second basis. This instantaneous balance is made significantly more complex by renewable energy such as wind and solar, which add more uncertainty and variability. A new research project is proposing a unique solution to […]