MIT developing ‘grid-scale’ energy storage.

An MIT team is working on a ‘flow-battery’ design that they say will be efficient enough to allow solar and wind farms to store energy, before releasing it into the grid later as demand requires.

Previously, battery designs haven’t met the Department of Energy’s target of less than $100 per kilowatt-hour for mass adoption of grid-scale energy storage, but the team claims their batteries will be cheaper and 10 times the power density of lithium-ion batteries.

The breakthrough comes from a new battery design which allows them to eliminate an expensive membrane normally used to separate two types of chemical in the battery, and which would normally corrode over time causing the battery to fail. The battery uses hydrogen and bromine, which produce a strong chemical reaction and are cheaply and widely available.