Salt Water Batteries

shinytop

Snake oil or real?  I've seen some discusssion of them on another forum and there is a company in Austria selling them.  Just wondering.  Apologies if this has been discussed before.  

Mickey666

The technology is real enough.  I recall reading about the research in New Scientist any years ago, but I guess the fact that they've not taken the world by storm might be yet another example of the difficulty of scaling up promising laboratory trials into a commercially viable product.

Reed_Richards

A battery is comprised of an anode, a cathode and something conducting in between.  Which bit is the salt water?

QrizB

Is this a marketing name for sodium ion batteries? I read some promising reports on those a little while ago. You can think of them as a lithium ion battery, but using sodium instead. The downside is that they have a lower energy density than lithium ion (so your battery need to be phisically larger and heavier to hold the same amount of energy) but they use sodium, which is as cheap as chips (you might even sprinkle sodium chloride on your chips) rather than lithium.

Not great for mobile devices or EVs, but potentially much cheaper for static energy storage.

Martyn1981

QrizB said:

Is this a marketing name for sodium ion batteries? I read some promising reports on those a little while ago. You can think of them as a lithium ion battery, but using sodium instead. The downside is that they have a lower energy density than lithium ion (so your battery need to be phisically larger and heavier to hold the same amount of energy) but they use sodium, which is as cheap as chips (you might even sprinkle sodium chloride on your chips) rather than lithium.

Not great for mobile devices or EVs, but potentially much cheaper for static energy storage.

That's them, and whilst, as you say, a lower energy density, they do seem to have promise for larger scale stationary storage. If notthing else, any technology that takes some of the strain off Li-ion, and its supply constraints, will help to decarbonize transport by default.
I like your chips metaphor, another I've heard, again relating to batteries, is that "if you want to make something dirt cheap, then make it out of dirt". I think this related to Iron, Nickel, and liquid metal batts, probably Prof. Sadoway.

Silly thought, but I think the term 'saltwater battery' can also be used, or perhaps misused, in talking about PHS that uses seawater. Pump the seawater up to a storage site when leccy is spare/cheap, and release it when you need the generation. This eliminates the need for a catchment lagoon (for PHS), and can also benefit from tidal changes which can reduce the height for pumping, and increase the fall for generation. It also vastly increases the availability of sites, as you no longer need to find a suitable river, flowing through a suitable valley, but now have a whole coast to explore, looking for a site where a hole can be scooped out, near, but well above the sea.

shinytop

This is the one I was referring to
https://www.bluesky-energy.eu/en/greenrock-home-2/
and this
https://www.zerohomebills.com/product/salt-water-battery/

QrizB

shinytop said:

This is the one I was referring to
https://www.bluesky-energy.eu/en/greenrock-home-2/
and this
https://www.zerohomebills.com/product/salt-water-battery/

Interesting to see it in a real-world application!

My immediate thought on reading the zerohomebills page is "that's almost three times the price of a Pylontech battery". There may be other advantages to saltwater but currently it's expensive for what you get. I do see a 5000-cycle life quoted, which is once daily for 13.6 years.