Scientists “bottle the sun” with a liquid battery that stores solar energy

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/05/260513221821.htm

by ndr42 • 2 months ago

57 44 2 months ago

sciencedaily.com

euroderf• 2 months ago

This sounds like an explosive breakthrough.

metalman• 2 months ago

bang.

there are a huge number of things that can store energy, chemicaly ,and reversibly, but the gotchas are always lurking, exotic wildly expensive ingedients, dangerous failure modes , or very complicated operational requirements that will not scale into the real world. this anouncent makes clear that is is based on dna, which is no surprise as nature is the ancient master of chemical energy storage,and which all of us useing right now anyway

____tom____• 2 months ago

"When exposed to a trigger -- such as a small amount of heat or a catalyst -- the molecule snaps back into its original form, releasing the stored energy as heat."

That's a bit concerning. Runaway waiting to happen.

rigonkulous2• 2 months ago

It sure would be nice to see some way to harness all this energy falling around us. I'd far prefer to just catch a few rays to charge my toys than plug into some far distant machine.

I remember thinking, in my youth, that the technology that enabled CASIO calculation would one day be applied as well to a bigger Turing machine, but I'm yet to see a solar-powered computer.

I sure wish it'd happen, though. All these magic solar energy storage/conversion systems need to start showing up on SOM/SOC's, imho ..

micromacrofoot3• 2 months ago

you still need too much surface area and too much storage to generate the amount of power needed

absent of a major breakthrough solar will always be a house/grid level technology, which is fine and works at scale

nickpeterson• 2 months ago

I think I saw an apple A16 takes about 8 watts, which would be about a square foot of solar panel. So assuming we keep making progress it doesn’t seem insane to me that a laptop where the back of the lcd is a solar panel would be enough?

blacksmith_tb2• 2 months ago

Sure, so a solar-only laptop is not practical, but generating the power in its battery on your roof is a solved problem.

This MOST process doesn't immediately look like it has home-scale applications (maybe in cold climates), but for heat to make steam, promising.

bawolff• 2 months ago

I wonder how far you could get if you were really trying. E.g. raspberry pi, eink, etc.

steanne• 2 months ago

i can think of a somewhat well-known one, but its uptime is predictably bad https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/

rigonkulous2• 2 months ago

This is always an inspiration for how close we can get ..

smt88• 2 months ago

I have solar panels at my house. My laptop, phone, and iPad are solar powered (on most days).

akdor1154• 2 months ago

I have a consumer motion-triggered camera that is armed 24/7 and records for 30 seconds after each trigger. It has WiFi and serves playback itself, as well as of course video encoding. It's probably running Linux though i haven't verified.

It runs off a 25cm square solar panel screwed to a wall that only receives direct illumination for 5 hours a day, and is not in any way optimised beyond 'that looks roughly like it's pointing at the sun'.

Works great!

vessenes• 2 months ago

Not clear from the very fluffy press release how one gets this pyrimidone to start releasing enough energy to boil water while it maintains 60% better energy density than lithium ion batteries.

I’d personally want to understand that before making any big plans, but this sounds cool.

flopsamjetsam• 2 months ago

Yeah, you'd think they'd include that.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aec6413

"Upon treatment with acid, that bond breaks to release more than a megajoule per kilogram of the compound, enough to rapidly boil water from a solution."

That's from the editor's summary (I haven't had time to read the paper).

kenhwang2• 2 months ago

From the article:

When exposed to a trigger -- such as a small amount of heat or a catalyst -- the molecule snaps back into its original form, releasing the stored energy as heat.

From the paper abstract, the catalyst is HCl. I don't have access to the full paper, so I don't know how they separate the HCl from the MOST to neutralize it to be rechargeable again.

kadoban• 2 months ago

"A small amount of heat or a catalyst". Well, that sounds unstable. So any random contamination and you have a runaway reaction.

gus_massa3• 2 months ago

As a sibling comment says, in the paper the catalyst is acid and I can't find the release using heat in the paper. Is that an hallucination in the press article?

(Note: At high enough temperature the thermal energy will be high enough to go over the energy wall from the high energy isometric to the normal one. So it's plausible. But with high enough temperatures a lot of nasty things can happen, like total decomposition or just burning. So it may not be a good strategy to make a rechargable baterry.)

chrisbrandow• 2 months ago

They experimental details in the paper itself. Tl;dr you lower the pH.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aec6413

DoctorOetker2• 2 months ago

also see:

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aec6413

AndrewDucker• 2 months ago

Stores it for return as heat. Which is useful, but not nearly as useful as returning it as electricity would be.

Still, if it could be stored stably in the summer and converted to heat in the winter then possibly helpful.

I wonder how the efficiencies compare to producing hydrogen or other burnable gases.

hn_throwaway_992• 2 months ago

Still, if it could be stored stably in the summer and converted to heat in the winter then possibly helpful.

There are already sand batteries that store heat well and are used in northern climates: https://polarnightenergy.com/news/worlds-largest-sand-batter...

pfdietz3• 2 months ago

These are too expensive for seasonal storage.

3eb7988a1663• 2 months ago

Something like 25% of global energy is dedicated to industrial heating. While not as immediately applicable as electricity, there are many uses for load shifting solar as heat.

That being said, there are some "hot rocks" companies who have been working with thermoptovoltaic cells. Which could still work, but the low hanging fruit is in the millions of direct uses for heat.

pfdietz3• 2 months ago

Still, if it could be stored stably in the summer and converted to heat in the winter then possibly helpful.

The capex per unit of stored energy in undoubtedly far too high for that to be worthwhile. Seasonal energy storage requires extremely low cost storage media.

CrzyLngPwd• 2 months ago

Trees also store the sun, and can release it back as heat.

Blackberries store the sun too, and later release it as wine or jam :)

gerdesj• 2 months ago

Blackberry crumble, with clotted cream or custard.

shiandow• 2 months ago

They can release it as glucose and oxygen actually, slightly better than just heat.

xigoi• 2 months ago

Trees store it extremely slowly, making them impractical for usage as batteries.

DoctorOetker2• 2 months ago

the charging is supposed to happen in plain sunlight in "UV collectors", or is renewable energy envisioned to power UV lamps / LEDs?

Danox• 2 months ago

Good news in trying times good work researchers at UC Santa Barbara education and hard work still pay off there is hope I was starting to wonder…

adrian_b• 2 months ago

Neither the press release nor the research paper abstract provide the only number that matters: the energy efficiency.

The energy stored per mass has little importance for a stationary system. What matters is the energy loss when the solar energy is stored into this chemical compound, instead of being converted directly by photovoltaic cells.

There are 2 losses, before storage only a part of the incoming solar energy is eventually stored into chemical bonds, the rest being either converted into heat or not absorbed.

The second loss is when the energy is recovered. As it seems that the temperature that can be attained when extracting the stored energy is very low, the efficiency of conversion into other forms of energy will also be very low.

In the absence of more precise information, this does not seem competitive with synthesizing hydrocarbons for long term energy storage, either in energy efficiency or in energy density, but only in the initial cost of the equipment, which is true only for now, as the living beings prove that synthesizing hydrocarbons from hydrogen generated with solar energy could be done at a very low cost.

Because of the inherent very low efficiency of using this to generate electrical energy, the abstract of the research paper suggests as possible uses only "on-demand heat delivery for water heating, cooking, and surface defrosting".

This may be useful, but far more useful is to use another method of energy storage that can be used for anything, not only for such limited applications. For myself, such a solution could provide only warm water for washing. For cooking, I would want my microwave oven, and I would also want my computers to work, so it would not make sense to invest in such a thing, instead of in a battery that could cover all my energy needs. Only if the energy efficiency from the incoming solar energy into the heat used to make hot water were significantly greater than when passing through photovoltaic cells and a battery, such a system could be useful to provide heating and warm water to a building, allowing for smaller batteries to cover the other energy consumption.

ninalanyon• 2 months ago

Energy efficiency is far from the only number that matters. Unless you are that rare person who is talking about total life time cost in energy terms.

You have to consider the cost of manufacturing, the cost of disposal, the cost of maintenance, possible externalities such as pollution of the environment, etc.

gus_massa3• 2 months ago

I agree, the molecule looks super tasty for bacterias. I guess any bacteria contamination would transform it into a green goo in a week.

Someone• 2 months ago

There are 2 losses, before storage only a part of the incoming solar energy is eventually stored into chemical bonds, the rest being either converted into heat or not absorbed.

Capturing some heat as non-heat still would make a house less warm in summer.

The second loss is when the energy is recovered. As it seems that the temperature that can be attained when extracting the stored energy is very low, the efficiency of conversion into other forms of energy will also be very low

If you use it to heat a house in winter, wouldn’t losses be very low?

(Since you say “For myself, such a solution could provide only warm water for washing”, that use case doesn’t apply to you, but many people do need to heat their houses in winter)

The energy stored per mass has little importance for a stationary system

For the use case I mentioned above, I think it matters. If you want to store heat for 6 months and then extract it, the volume/mass needed will be significant.

There also is a third loss: between the time you store the energy and the time you extract it. Many batteries have relatively high self-discharge (Google says 1-3% per month for Lithium-ion)

_If_ this does away with most of those losses, it could be competitive even though it is less efficient at capturing heat.

Having said that, this product probably has too low an energy density for that. Dry wood has ballpark ten times the energy per kg as modern batteries, but even for that, you need quite a bit of volume to warm a house in winter.

gus_massa3• 2 months ago

If you use it to heat a house in winter, wouldn’t losses be very low?

Usually you can do something like light->electricity->battery[x]->electricity->heatpump->heat. The efficient in the heatpump is like 300%, i.e. for every 1 Joule stored in the battery, the heatpump extracts 2 Joules from the ambient and sends 3 Joules of heat inside your home.

This device is something like light->bath[y]->heat.

If you assume both get the same amount of light, it's misleading to compare the energy stored in battery[x] and bath[y], because the first has a magic x3 later that comes from the heat pump. This sods not depends on the exact setup, but it's an important difference between "work" and "heat" in a thermal machine.

Markoff• 2 months ago

and here I am thinking this will be about Moser bottle lamps

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23536914

Scientists “bottle the sun” with a liquid battery that stores solar energy

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