STANFORD UNIVERSITY, CALIFORNIA, USA. Researchers and engineers have recently developed a grid-scale battery that can last for about a thousand charges without degrading. Renewable energy has always been a serious problem because batteries easily degrade after a few hundred charges. Both solar and wind energy provide renewable energy but the batteries being used to store it is where the problems start. With the development of this grid-scale battery, we just got a step closer to cheaper, efficient and renewable large-scale energy production that a lot of people can benefit from in the near future.

The structure of the battery’s electrodes plays an important role in its design. Usually, charged particles move towards the positive electrode of a regular battery when it is being charged. When it is being discharged, the particles flow back to the negative electrode which creates an electric current. Electrodes degrade as the ions move back and forth when the process is repeated several hundred times.

Engineer Yi Cui and his team of researchers at the Stanford University are working on the research. In the grid-scale battery they have developed, the negatively charged cathode is coated in hexacyanoferrate while the positively charged anode is composed of an electrically conductive polymer and activated carbon. The electrodes come in a liquid solution of potassium ions that are positively charged. That way, it can easily flow between the anode and cathode without damaging them.

This technology may be applied on a large scale because the materials used for this battery are commercially available. Also, the team of developers claims that this battery could change the way we see renewable energy in the near future as it is set to become more reliable, cheaper and successful.