As the climate crisis looms, scientists are racing to solve common clean energy problems, including solar energy storage.
Solar energy is one of the best renewable resources, but it has problems that prevent its widespread adoption and replacement of traditional energy sources.
Since solar energy is variable throughout the day and the year, it is essential to have a reliable storage system. At present, solar energy is converted into electricity in solar cells, which cannot store energy for a long time, and storage systems with separate batteries are inconvenient and expensive.
To solve this problem, researchers are trying to find ways to combine the needs of energy conversion and solar energy storage capacity into one device. Previous attempts to simplify solar energy conversion and storage combined two different components into a complex device architecture that ended up being inefficient, expensive, and heavy.
But significant progress has been made in combining these elements into a single device that uses common elements and significantly reduces the problems of previous designs.
The study results were summarized in an article published May 26 in Nano Research Energy. “The amount of solar energy received on the Earth’s surface is up to 100,000 terawatt-hours, which fully provides for the annual global energy consumption of 16 terawatts,” said author Hairong Xue, associate professor at the National Institute of Materials. Science in Tsukuba, Japan. ”
However, solar power is fickle like wind power due to insulation fluctuations. To balance supply and demand, converted solar energy must be stored in other energy storage devices.
Therefore, it is critical to implement suitable energy storage technologies in solar cells, making it possible to efficiently use solar energy and deliver the generated electricity as needed.
The paper summarizes progress in the use of six different types of rechargeable photo-enhanced metal batteries: lithium-ion, zinc-ion, lithium-sulphur, lithium-iodine, zinc-iodine, lithium-oxygen, zinc-oxygen, and lithium-carbon-oxygen batteries.
The authors describe in detail the advantages and disadvantages of each type of batteries and how they can be used to convert and store solar energy into electrical energy.
For example, rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, which we are all familiar with because they are used in many of today’s electronic devices, including laptops, phones, and electric vehicles, are efficient but difficult to scale for solar power due to their complex structure.
The researchers note that this technology is still in its early stages, and more research remains to be done. Looking to the future, they hope to take the next steps to improve solar storage with rechargeable photo-enhanced metal batteries.