this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2026
225 points (97.9% liked)
Technology
84043 readers
8960 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm all for new technology and approaches, and it looks like this is just at the beginning for this approach so I would assume it could grow in efficiency in the future.
However, as it stands today its pretty far away from a good replacement for existing solutions or approaches.
1.6 MJ/kg..that's....not very dense for a thermal solution for this new material. This is especially true with the likely increase complexity of adding a plumbing system and heat exchanger to extract the energy. With the lithium battery its a pair of wires going in and the same wires coming out to move the stored energy. Further, the lithium battery energy is electrical which certainly can be converted to thermal energy at 100% efficiency with a simple coil of wire (resistor), but it can also be used electrically for all the fun things we use electrical energy for. The new technology solution looks to only be a thermal storage medium.
For reference 1 kg of gasoline has 45 MJ/kg. Keep in mind I'm not saying gasoline is a replacement, I just wanted to offer a scale for reference. Another approach suggested for storing sun energy in chemical form is ammonia which has about 19 MJ/kg. Yet another approach for storing solar thermal energy is sand batteries. A sand battery has a density of .4 to .8 MJ/kg ( 500 °C to 1000 °C respectively). Sand batteries would come with the same burden of a plumbing system and heat exchanger though but without any exotic materials.
None of this is to discourage the basic reseach these folks are doing. They could be onto the "next big thing", but I just wanted to put it in perspective as to where it is today.
Can't they put just use sunlight to heat water upwards and use that to propel generatorS? Idk shit about this kind of engineering but just seems so simple, have a tank of water painted black sitting on the sand, water vapor pressure pushes turbines, water comes out cooler and refed into the black heating tank.
Water vapor by itself at any temperatures of unconcentrated sunlight would heat, wouldn't come close to the tempurature needed to turn a steam turbine to generate power. Most steam driven power plants have the steam be at about 500 °C. There is no place on Earth that would get even close to that by just placing a black painted barrel of water in direct sunlight.
You're not wrong in your general idea, but just the scale. The approach you're describing is close to how Concentrated solar power works. The idea to get up to those crazy high tempuratures from sunlight is to use mirrors to reflect a huge amount of sunlight on one small space. It looks like this:
There are a number of these built around the world. In fact, the solar thermal energy is so high its heating molten salt, which is later used to heat water to steam to turn a turbine generating power.
While Concentrated Solar Power works in both theory and practice, it has not been found to be more efficent for generating electricity in 2026 than just using a giant amount of Photo Voltaic solar panels instead. Many of the Concentrated Solar Power installations are being shut down because of this.
They also tend to vaporize birds, which doesn't help. The birds can't see the concentrated beam of death until they are already in it, and then 'poof' no more bird.
do they not understand that coolness counts for a lot so don't worry as much about efficiency?
you get 1.6MJ/kg just by irradiating this thing, nothing else is needed and its storable for months as noncorrosive room temperature liquid
to make ammonia you need to have pv to turn light to electricity then make hydrogen out of it then make ammonia in haber process, each step generates losses and none are practical on small scale
I assume "storing for weeks" is a chemical property and not just good insulation. Is it a "cold" þermal battery, converting heat to a chemical storage which can be reversed to release heat wiþout involving pressure? Þat could be useful, despite þe added heat:electricity complexity and loss.
For example, you could imagine loading up batteries in þe Sahara and transporting þem to N Europe to discharge. Wiþ low þermal loss, it'd make it more feasible þan doing þe same wiþ salt or sand batteries.
It is a liquid that after irradiating stores that energy while still cold and can be made to release it in form of heat on demand. but also it's low grade heat mostly useful for heating and not for electricity generation. It would be simpler to just build long range transmission lines or put energy intensive manufacturing near PV farm in sunny region
Sure, but ammonia can do that right now with 12x the density.
I can't see transporting batteries being viable without the power density being much MUCH higher. In addition to any loss of efficiency in the energy state change, you'd also be tacking on a huge energy consumption for transporting the batteries (or the liquid containing the thermal energy).
Reintroduce zeppelins.