Sustainability Problem
Too many energy sources are currently dirty and expensive. With the growing renewable energy sector, we need a way to decrease the strain on the grid and make solar dispatchable.
Technology
Aquion’s sodium-ion batteries provide a low-cost way to store large amounts of energy through thousands of battery cycles (the batteries can deliver a round-trip efficiency of 85 percent and perform 5,000 cycles), and a non-toxic end product made from widely available material inputs and which operates safely and reliably across a wide range of temperatures and operating environments
How the technology works: Aqueous Hybrid Ion (AHI) chemistry is composed of a saltwater electrolyte, manganese oxide cathode, carbon titanium phosphate composite anode, and synthetic cotton separator. The battery utilizes non-corrosive intercalation reactions at the anode and cathode.
Compared to other solar storage technologies:
Stakeholders
- Solar companies
- Utilities
- Solar producers (homeowners/businesses)
- Battery manufacturers
Steps to implementation
- Obtain more funding for research and marketing
- Outreach to businesses who would like to partner and create pilot programs
- Create plan to scale to homeowners
Sources
makeasmartcity 
This is interesting! I come from a country that is actually an archipelago of over 7,000 islands so there’s plenty of salt water to go around! This can be helpful to a lot of people.
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Energy storage is going to be vital to the renewable energy build up, especially if we have targets of 50% by 2030. One of the major drawbacks of current storage options, besides the cost, is the toxicity of the batteries. Having this saline solution, or other bio-options, will open a whole new option for a better “green” storage option. Hopefully they can ramp this technology up quickly and drive down the cost per kWh in order to capture the recent growth in storage.
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The response above was from Sean Meriwether, spm2163.
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