Plan to commercialize supercapacitors in the next few years
A solution that is inexpensive, scales, is not inconvenient, and fits household demands? What’s the catch?
I hope it’s as good as it sounds and becomes a thing.
The last time this news was posted everyone tore into it. I don’t remember the details, but it was funny.
It’s just not feasible in reality.
One of the big catches is how Greenhouse gas intensive concrete production is
I think the idea here is to bake it into construction that would happen anyway. If you just need energy storage, keep using batteries. But if you’re pouring a foundation already, why not also turn that foundation into a battery?
One catch is that carbon black is mostly made from fossil oil.
That’s only because that’s where we have an access currently. You can make carbon black by burning a whole lot of different things. Pretty much anything carbon-based. You don’t make carbon black specifically, you harvest carbon black from other processes and refine it if needed.
The catch is, if it works some oil company is gonna buy it out and kill it.
I mean, there’s a reason why we’ve taken so long with even electric cars lol I hope this becomes a reality, but moneyed interests will fight tooth and nail.
Edit: Also, they sold the idea of electric cars to us so we wouldn’t question a lack of infrastructure investment in railways which we so desperately need.
Yeah they’ll scoop up the technology patents and then slowly utilize it if and when it works in their favor to maximize their profits
The team worked out that a 45 cubic meter material block of nanocarbon-black-doped concrete would have enough capacity to store about 10kWh
10kWh is enough to run a house for a day, how much concrete would be in a house with concrete walls?
naturally it depends on the walls and house layout, but just to have an idea: assuming a concrete thickness of 20cm and 4 external walls of 20m x 3m each:
0.2 * 4 * 20 * 3 = 48m^3
probably in the 100-200m^3 ballpark if we count internal walls, which are thinner, but cover more total length.
And I know walls are usually not pure concrete, but functions like energy storage could very well change how we build them.
I mean, its not clear you want to build a house out of concrete walls that aren’t entirely, well, concrete. Even so, its a neat idea, but coming out of the MIT press mill, I’ll not be holding my breath for it to become real. MIT is basically a meme at this point with regards to press releases that don’t manifest into reality.
I wonder if the foundation of the house would be convenient for this… that much concrete is equivalent to a cube of side length around 10 feet, which seems to at least be in the ballpark for the total amount of concrete in a foundation. I think?
10kWh is enough to run one 110VAC outlet at full capacity for about 10 hours. I don’t know where that 10kWh figure comes from but most American houses use between 15-30kWh per day.
So that 10 foot cube would need to be closer to 15ft cubed. It’s huge. Perhaps the foundation of the structure would work, as someone else mentioned.
UK average is 8 kWh / 24 hours for electricity per household of 2.4 people.
For a basement with a 5-inch slab and exterior walls are 8 inches, 8ft high and also concrete… Then 45 cubic meters is about what you’d need.
Of course, your basement walls are about as electrically grounded as it gets, so I doubt you’d be able to store power in them. One leak and you’re discharging all that power into the groundwater.
So, feasible amount. Just needs isolating and could replace expensive batteries for solar?
