Engineers at the City University of New York's Energy Institute are launching a startup to commercialize an advanced nickel-zinc technology for renewable energy battery storage.
The significance of this startup is to overcome reliability problems attributed to wind farms and solar plants by deploying batteries that store power and deliver it to the grid when needed.
Some shortfalls, however, limiting the success of the batteries are the enormous cost and low durability of today's batteries.
But with new nickel-zinc battery technology, CUNY engineers in Manhattan say it's just as cheap as short-lived, lead-acid batteries, and just as long-lasting as lithium-ion batteries-one of the costliest technologies on the market.
The four-year-old Energy Institute is calling the company Urban Electric Power.
Settled in a clearing, the company's Nickel-Zinc Flow Battery system will connect by cable to rows of wind turbines or fields of solar panels, storing up electricity generated on windy nights or particularly-sunny days and sending power to the grid during peak periods.
The upfront cost of the nickel-zinc system is expected to be less than other energy storage options.
The institute's kilowatt-hour nickel-zinc battery costs between $300 and $500, or as much as $100,000 for a 200-battery system with a life of up to 15 years.
The costs are expected to fall, the institute told Inside Climate News, to the same price as a lead-acid battery, which lasts about a year.
The Energy Institute's batter technology is currently in the prototype phase.
If successful, the Energy Institutes technology would "put the U.S. on a path towards creating a smarter grid with low-cost batteries that are capable of storing enough electricity to power homes, cars and cities," according to an Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy description of the project.
The institute is also developing another battery technology that would use zinc and manganese dioxide that would be even cheaper and longer-lasting. The institute plans to launch a basement-level demonstration of the new technology within a year.
Source: Reuters; Inside Climate News
