FEATURE: Salt-and-water battery could help plug renewables gap
"While the efficiency of wind and solar technologies has improved rapidly, the problem of storage has yet to be solved." Image: deliormanli/iStockphoto Australian researchers have developed a sodium-ion-based battery which, they say, has the potential to solve one of sustainable energy’s greatest challenges – storing energy cheaply ‘offline’ after it has been generated.Dr Manickam Minakshi and Dr Danielle Meyrick from Western Australia’s Murdoch University point out that, while the efficiency of wind and solar technologies has improved rapidly, the problem of storage has yet to be solved.‘The central obstacle facing sustainable energy is unreliability. Wind turbines don’t turn on a still day. Solar doesn’t work at night and can be hampered in the day by cloud, dust or snow coverage,’ Dr Minakshi said.‘To provide power at non-generation times, excess energy needs to be stored in batteries, but storage technologies now being considered, such as molten salt or molten sulfur, work at high...