My Arts Editor draws my attention to this article on a novel form of battery technology in Science Alert:
Scientists in Sweden have developed a specialised fluid, called a solar thermal fuel, that can store energy from the sun for well over a decade.
“A solar thermal fuel is like a rechargeable battery, but instead of electricity, you put sunlight in and get heat out, triggered on demand,” Jeffrey Grossman, an engineer works with these materials at MIT explained to NBC News.
The fluid is actually a molecule in liquid form that scientists from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden have been working on improving for over a year.
This molecule is composed of carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen, and when it is hit by sunlight, it does something unusual: the bonds between its atoms are rearranged and it turns into an energised new version of itself, called an isomer.
Like prey caught in a trap, energy from the sun is thus captured between the isomer’s strong chemical bonds, and it stays there even when the molecule cools down to room temperature.
A fascinating bit of science – but is it technology? That is, can this be scaled up to be an industrial solution?
And then, a solution to what? Obviously, it’s a new and interesting form of battery, since it stores and releases energy, and it doesn’t appear to be difficult to use on release. How well does it transport? And can it be manufactured without polluting the shit out of the environment? The article mentions C, H, and N, none of which qualify as rare, so that’s a good sign – but what does it take to make the molecule? The fact that the power source is the local star is, of course, a very good thing.
And then the fact that it appears to absorb some spectrum of the incoming electromagnetic spectrum is interesting. Is it the same part of the spectrum which is instrumental in anthropocentric climate change? If so, can we use this as a stopgap measure while we continue to work on stopping the creation of carbon dioxide and methane, the two most worrisome climate change gases?
And for those of us who are especially paranoid, if this does prove to be a viable stopgap, have we just bestowed longer life on the fossil fuel industry? Since this stopgap has no effect on the growing percentage of CO2 in the air, then the recent research concerning carbohydrates making up a growing percentage of the foods we harvest, I’d suggest that permitting the fossil fuel companies to continue to enable the pollution of our atmosphere would probably be a mistake from a body health point of view.
So many questions!
