Neither the press release nor the research paper abstract provide the only number that matters: the energy efficiency.
The energy stored per mass has little importance for a stationary system. What matters is the energy loss when the solar energy is stored into this chemical compound, instead of being converted directly by photovoltaic cells.
There are 2 losses, before storage only a part of the incoming solar energy is eventually stored into chemical bonds, the rest being either converted into heat or not absorbed.
The second loss is when the energy is recovered. As it seems that the temperature that can be attained when extracting the stored energy is very low, the efficiency of conversion into other forms of energy will also be very low.
In the absence of more precise information, this does not seem competitive with synthesizing hydrocarbons for long term energy storage, either in energy efficiency or in energy density, but only in the initial cost of the equipment, which is true only for now, as the living beings prove that synthesizing hydrocarbons from hydrogen generated with solar energy could be done at a very low cost.
Because of the inherent very low efficiency of using this to generate electrical energy, the abstract of the research paper suggests as possible uses only "on-demand heat delivery for water heating, cooking, and surface defrosting".
This may be useful, but far more useful is to use another method of energy storage that can be used for anything, not only for such limited applications. For myself, such a solution could provide only warm water for washing. For cooking, I would want my microwave oven, and I would also want my computers to work, so it would not make sense to invest in such a thing, instead of in a battery that could cover all my energy needs. Only if the energy efficiency from the incoming solar energy into the heat used to make hot water were significantly greater than when passing through photovoltaic cells and a battery, such a system could be useful to provide heating and warm water to a building, allowing for smaller batteries to cover the other energy consumption.
Not clear from the very fluffy press release how one gets this pyrimidone to start releasing enough energy to boil water while it maintains 60% better energy density than lithium ion batteries.
I’d personally want to understand that before making any big plans, but this sounds cool.
"Upon treatment with acid, that bond breaks to release more than a megajoule per kilogram of the compound, enough to rapidly boil water from a solution."
That's from the editor's summary (I haven't had time to read the paper).
> When exposed to a trigger -- such as a small amount of heat or a catalyst -- the molecule snaps back into its original form, releasing the stored energy as heat.
From the paper abstract, the catalyst is HCl. I don't have access to the full paper, so I don't know how they separate the HCl from the MOST to neutralize it to be rechargeable again.
From what I've seen of the paper, it seems like the catalyst is needed for a full energy release reaction. Regular batteries also have rapid energy release with unintended contamination of a chemical (water), and we still generally have no problems during regular usage.
The reaction triggered by heat doesn't release all the stored energy, which would be the bigger concern for unintended runaway reactions.
As a sibling comment says, in the paper the catalyst is acid and I can't find the release using heat in the paper. Is that an hallucination in the press article?
(Note: At high enough temperature the thermal energy will be high enough to go over the energy wall from the high energy isometric to the normal one. So it's plausible. But with high enough temperatures a lot of nasty things can happen, like total decomposition or just burning. So it may not be a good strategy to make a rechargable baterry.)
It sure would be nice to see some way to harness all this energy falling around us. I'd far prefer to just catch a few rays to charge my toys than plug into some far distant machine.
I remember thinking, in my youth, that the technology that enabled CASIO calculation would one day be applied as well to a bigger Turing machine, but I'm yet to see a solar-powered computer.
I sure wish it'd happen, though. All these magic solar energy storage/conversion systems need to start showing up on SOM/SOC's, imho ..
I have a consumer motion-triggered camera that is armed 24/7 and records for 30 seconds after each trigger. It has WiFi and serves playback itself, as well as of course video encoding. It's probably running Linux though i haven't verified.
It runs off a 25cm square solar panel screwed to a wall that only receives direct illumination for 5 hours a day, and is not in any way optimised beyond 'that looks roughly like it's pointing at the sun'.
I think I saw an apple A16 takes about 8 watts, which would be about a square foot of solar panel. So assuming we keep making progress it doesn’t seem insane to me that a laptop where the back of the lcd is a solar panel would be enough?
Angle though isn't ideal, unless the PV panel pops off the lid so you can position it better (and still be able to open the screen far enough back to read - though that's often not great in bright sun). I remember the OLPC could be run by hoisting a bucket of sand or water up on a rope and pulley on a tree branch and letting it drive a small generator as that came back down - and that was almost 20yr ago).
Something like 25% of global energy is dedicated to industrial heating. While not as immediately applicable as electricity, there are many uses for load shifting solar as heat.
That being said, there are some "hot rocks" companies who have been working with thermoptovoltaic cells. Which could still work, but the low hanging fruit is in the millions of direct uses for heat.
"Seasonal storage" is a problem so far out that it feels like it's not even worth worrying about until renewables are a much higher percentage of the overall energy mix. What I mean by this is that even places that (for example) have a huge abundance of solar power during the day still have to burn fossil fuels when it's nighttime or when it's cloudy - solving the "24 hour problem" will still take a lot more renewable capacity than we currently have.
And even then, we already have the ability to create synthetic fuels from electricity, so any new development would need to be competitive with what we can already do.
> Still, if it could be stored stably in the summer and converted to heat in the winter then possibly helpful.
The capex per unit of stored energy in undoubtedly far too high for that to be worthwhile. Seasonal energy storage requires extremely low cost storage media.
"When exposed to a trigger -- such as a small amount of heat or a catalyst -- the molecule snaps back into its original form, releasing the stored energy as heat."
That's a bit concerning. Runaway waiting to happen.
there are a huge number of things that can store energy, chemicaly ,and reversibly, but the gotchas are always lurking, exotic wildly expensive ingedients, dangerous failure modes , or very complicated operational requirements that will not scale into the real world.
this anouncent makes clear that is is based on dna, which is no surprise as nature is the ancient master of chemical energy storage,and which all of us useing right now
anyway
Neither the press release nor the research paper abstract provide the only number that matters: the energy efficiency.
The energy stored per mass has little importance for a stationary system. What matters is the energy loss when the solar energy is stored into this chemical compound, instead of being converted directly by photovoltaic cells.
There are 2 losses, before storage only a part of the incoming solar energy is eventually stored into chemical bonds, the rest being either converted into heat or not absorbed.
The second loss is when the energy is recovered. As it seems that the temperature that can be attained when extracting the stored energy is very low, the efficiency of conversion into other forms of energy will also be very low.
In the absence of more precise information, this does not seem competitive with synthesizing hydrocarbons for long term energy storage, either in energy efficiency or in energy density, but only in the initial cost of the equipment, which is true only for now, as the living beings prove that synthesizing hydrocarbons from hydrogen generated with solar energy could be done at a very low cost.
Because of the inherent very low efficiency of using this to generate electrical energy, the abstract of the research paper suggests as possible uses only "on-demand heat delivery for water heating, cooking, and surface defrosting".
This may be useful, but far more useful is to use another method of energy storage that can be used for anything, not only for such limited applications. For myself, such a solution could provide only warm water for washing. For cooking, I would want my microwave oven, and I would also want my computers to work, so it would not make sense to invest in such a thing, instead of in a battery that could cover all my energy needs. Only if the energy efficiency from the incoming solar energy into the heat used to make hot water were significantly greater than when passing through photovoltaic cells and a battery, such a system could be useful to provide heating and warm water to a building, allowing for smaller batteries to cover the other energy consumption.
Not clear from the very fluffy press release how one gets this pyrimidone to start releasing enough energy to boil water while it maintains 60% better energy density than lithium ion batteries.
I’d personally want to understand that before making any big plans, but this sounds cool.
Yeah, you'd think they'd include that.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aec6413
"Upon treatment with acid, that bond breaks to release more than a megajoule per kilogram of the compound, enough to rapidly boil water from a solution."
That's from the editor's summary (I haven't had time to read the paper).
From the article:
> When exposed to a trigger -- such as a small amount of heat or a catalyst -- the molecule snaps back into its original form, releasing the stored energy as heat.
From the paper abstract, the catalyst is HCl. I don't have access to the full paper, so I don't know how they separate the HCl from the MOST to neutralize it to be rechargeable again.
"A small amount of heat or a catalyst". Well, that sounds unstable. So any random contamination and you have a runaway reaction.
From what I've seen of the paper, it seems like the catalyst is needed for a full energy release reaction. Regular batteries also have rapid energy release with unintended contamination of a chemical (water), and we still generally have no problems during regular usage.
The reaction triggered by heat doesn't release all the stored energy, which would be the bigger concern for unintended runaway reactions.
A small amount of heat is a lot harder to isolate from than water though.
As a sibling comment says, in the paper the catalyst is acid and I can't find the release using heat in the paper. Is that an hallucination in the press article?
(Note: At high enough temperature the thermal energy will be high enough to go over the energy wall from the high energy isometric to the normal one. So it's plausible. But with high enough temperatures a lot of nasty things can happen, like total decomposition or just burning. So it may not be a good strategy to make a rechargable baterry.)
They experimental details in the paper itself. Tl;dr you lower the pH.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aec6413
Trees also store the sun, and can release it back as heat.
Blackberries store the sun too, and later release it as wine or jam :)
Blackberry crumble, with clotted cream or custard.
They can release it as glucose and oxygen actually, slightly better than just heat.
It sure would be nice to see some way to harness all this energy falling around us. I'd far prefer to just catch a few rays to charge my toys than plug into some far distant machine.
I remember thinking, in my youth, that the technology that enabled CASIO calculation would one day be applied as well to a bigger Turing machine, but I'm yet to see a solar-powered computer.
I sure wish it'd happen, though. All these magic solar energy storage/conversion systems need to start showing up on SOM/SOC's, imho ..
I have a consumer motion-triggered camera that is armed 24/7 and records for 30 seconds after each trigger. It has WiFi and serves playback itself, as well as of course video encoding. It's probably running Linux though i haven't verified.
It runs off a 25cm square solar panel screwed to a wall that only receives direct illumination for 5 hours a day, and is not in any way optimised beyond 'that looks roughly like it's pointing at the sun'.
Works great!
i can think of a somewhat well-known one, but its uptime is predictably bad https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/
I have solar panels at my house. My laptop, phone, and iPad are solar powered (on most days).
you still need too much surface area and too much storage to generate the amount of power needed
absent of a major breakthrough solar will always be a house/grid level technology, which is fine and works at scale
Sure, so a solar-only laptop is not practical, but generating the power in its battery on your roof is a solved problem.
This MOST process doesn't immediately look like it has home-scale applications (maybe in cold climates), but for heat to make steam, promising.
I wonder how far you could get if you were really trying. E.g. raspberry pi, eink, etc.
Yeah, I suspect we're mostly quite wasteful of energy.
I think I saw an apple A16 takes about 8 watts, which would be about a square foot of solar panel. So assuming we keep making progress it doesn’t seem insane to me that a laptop where the back of the lcd is a solar panel would be enough?
Angle though isn't ideal, unless the PV panel pops off the lid so you can position it better (and still be able to open the screen far enough back to read - though that's often not great in bright sun). I remember the OLPC could be run by hoisting a bucket of sand or water up on a rope and pulley on a tree branch and letting it drive a small generator as that came back down - and that was almost 20yr ago).
the mild inconvenience of needing to be in direct sun for N hours always overshadows this
you need a massive efficiency improvement to overcome this
we're still in the calculators and tv remotes level of on-device solar
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Stores it for return as heat. Which is useful, but not nearly as useful as returning it as electricity would be.
Still, if it could be stored stably in the summer and converted to heat in the winter then possibly helpful.
I wonder how the efficiencies compare to producing hydrogen or other burnable gases.
Something like 25% of global energy is dedicated to industrial heating. While not as immediately applicable as electricity, there are many uses for load shifting solar as heat.
That being said, there are some "hot rocks" companies who have been working with thermoptovoltaic cells. Which could still work, but the low hanging fruit is in the millions of direct uses for heat.
> Still, if it could be stored stably in the summer and converted to heat in the winter then possibly helpful.
There are already sand batteries that store heat well and are used in northern climates: https://polarnightenergy.com/news/worlds-largest-sand-batter...
These are too expensive for seasonal storage.
"Seasonal storage" is a problem so far out that it feels like it's not even worth worrying about until renewables are a much higher percentage of the overall energy mix. What I mean by this is that even places that (for example) have a huge abundance of solar power during the day still have to burn fossil fuels when it's nighttime or when it's cloudy - solving the "24 hour problem" will still take a lot more renewable capacity than we currently have.
And even then, we already have the ability to create synthetic fuels from electricity, so any new development would need to be competitive with what we can already do.
> Still, if it could be stored stably in the summer and converted to heat in the winter then possibly helpful.
The capex per unit of stored energy in undoubtedly far too high for that to be worthwhile. Seasonal energy storage requires extremely low cost storage media.
Good news in trying times good work researchers at UC Santa Barbara education and hard work still pay off there is hope I was starting to wonder…
This sounds like an explosive breakthrough.
"When exposed to a trigger -- such as a small amount of heat or a catalyst -- the molecule snaps back into its original form, releasing the stored energy as heat."
That's a bit concerning. Runaway waiting to happen.
bang.
there are a huge number of things that can store energy, chemicaly ,and reversibly, but the gotchas are always lurking, exotic wildly expensive ingedients, dangerous failure modes , or very complicated operational requirements that will not scale into the real world. this anouncent makes clear that is is based on dna, which is no surprise as nature is the ancient master of chemical energy storage,and which all of us useing right now anyway
also see:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aec6413
the charging is supposed to happen in plain sunlight in "UV collectors", or is renewable energy envisioned to power UV lamps / LEDs?