Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have recently announced that they have overcome a major hindrance to large-scale solar power that could unleash a solar revolution: storing energy for use when the sun doesn’t shine.
After receiving a $10 million grant from the Chesonis Family Foundation to launch the Solar Revolution project, the MIT researchers are in high spirits and can successfully announce the discovery of a simple, inexpensive, highly efficient process for storing solar energy.
James Barber, Ernst Chain Professor of Biochemistry, Imperial College London said: "The importance of their discovery cannot be overstated since it opens up the door for developing new technologies for energy production thus reducing our dependence for fossil fuels and addressing the global climate change problem."
Utilizing non-toxic natural materials, this discovery could unlock the most potently effective, carbon-free energy source available globally: the sun. MIT’s Daniel Nocera, Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy, and Matthew Kanan, a postdoctoral researcher in Nocera’s lab, have developed a process that will allow the sun’s energy to be used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gases – similar to the photosynthesis processes performed by plants. The gases are then recombined inside a fuel cell, creating carbon-free electricity to power a house or transportation such as electric cars, day or night.
The innovation in Nocera and Kanan’s process comes from a new catalyst consisting of cobalt metal, phosphate and an electrode, placed in water. And then the science takes over – when electricity (from a photovoltaic cell, a wind turbine or any other source) runs through the electrode, the cobalt and phosphate materialize and form a thin film on the electrode, and oxygen gas is produced.
The new catalyst works at room temperature, in neutral pH water, and it is simple to set up – “That’s why I know this is going to work. It’s so easy to implement,” Nocera said.
Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and by the Chesonis Family Foundation, the project has become part of the MIT Energy Initiative, a program designed to help transform the global energy system to help meet the needs of today’s future and to help build a bridge to that objective by improving today's energy systems.
The funding is clearly helping MIT make strides into solar research. Just last month MIT researchers announced that they had discovered a "solar concentrator," which increases the power generated by a solar cell by a factor of forty.
The discovery made by the MIT duo marks another giant step toward generating clean, carbon-free energy on a substantial scale. It is true that sunlight has the greatest potential of any power to solve the world’s energy problems. In one hour, enough sunlight strikes the Earth to provide the entire planet’s energy needs for one year.
However, the electrolyzers that are currently available and used industrially are not suited for artificial photosynthesis because they are extremely costly and only operate in a basic environment that does not permit integration into a broader usage, under which the photosynthesis required can operate.
The fellows at MIT know that further engineering work needs to be done in order to integrate the new discovery into existing photovoltaic modules, but the Solar Revolution project hopes that within 10 years, homeowners will power their homes via photovoltaic cells throughout the day, whilst using excess energy to power their household fuel cell – making electricity by wire a thing of the past.
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Posted under Articles, Environmental News, Renewable Energy
This post was written by Ryan Whatley on August 15, 2008