What to do with all this Renewable Energy

A couple of posts ago I talked about renewable energy and some of the developments that are occurring around it, there is however another key element to renewable energy generation that is not mentioned nearly enough and it is just as important. It is the storage of this energy, one of the key concerns about widespread adoption of renewable energy is that it is heavily dependent on the climate and conditions of the site. For example, large solar arrays would not be an intelligent idea in northern Canada as there are long periods during the winter where the sun sets very early in the afternoon, removing hours of effective energy generation.

The need to develop effective means to store renewable energy is essential if there is any hope of replacing fossil fuels. One potential solution is the development of smart grids, where houses will generate their own energy from renewable sources which are then fed into a collective storage facility for the community, where it is distributed back out to the locations where the power is needed. In order for this to be a realistic possibility some physical aspects of battery storage must be addressed.

An alternative to Lithium ion batteries must be used as lithium is far too scarce for widespread use, a good contender currently is sodium ion batteries. As sodium is one of the most abundant elements in the Earth’s crust it would be far cheaper to mass produce these batteries, however there are some issues that must be further developed with sodium batteries. Firstly their capacity is much less than that of lithium, also they do not have a long enough life span to be realistically used and the energy density for sodium is too low to be used within a practical space. Some solutions to these problems are currently being worked on, such as; Functional N-doped interconnected Nanowires, NaV6O16 Nanorods and Tin Oxide @ Multiwalled Carbon Nanotubes. Each of these improves a different characteristic of sodium batteries.

Effective renewable energy is one of the highest priorities in the world right now, and it is one of the determining factors in the quality of life future generations will experience. As a result it is everyone’s responsibility to do their part in providing a better world for the future, and being able to better utilise that energy in locations where is was previously impossible is one of the biggest benefits of global renewable energy storage.

Sources:

Z. Wang, L. Qie, L. Yuan, W. Zhang, X. Hu, Y. Huang, Functionalized N-Doped interconnected carbon nanofibers as an anode material for sodium-ion storage with excellent performance, Carbon 55 (2013) 328-334.

H. Liu, H. Zhou, L. Chen, Z. Tang, W. Yang, Electrochemical insertion/deinsertion of sodium on NaV₆O₁₅ nanorods as cathode material of rechargeable sodium based batteries, Journal of Power Sources 196 (2011) 814-819.

Y. Wang, D. Su, C. Wang, G. Wang, SnO₂@MWCNT nanocomposite as a high capacity anode material for sodium-ion batteries, Electrochemistry Communications 29 (2013) 8-11.