We're living in an increasingly connected world. The “Internet of Things (IoT),” where we can interact with not only everyone but everything is becoming a reality. But without energy, the IoT doesn't exist and the Kingdom's in a difficult situation. Saudi Arabia sells its oil abroad to fund its economic aspirations at home, but it also needs that oil to fuel its power plants in order to produce electricity and water. In the Kingdom, the IoT, could run off a different energy source than oil. Saudi Arabia has a huge amount of free solar resources that could be harnessed to power every connected device in the land. According to the World Weather and Climate Information website, in January, Riyadh receives an average of 200 hours of sunshine. During the summer, that average shoots up to more than 300 hours monthly. The Motley Fool noted that the Kingdom is burning nearly one million barrels of oil a day during the summer months for power generation and by 2020 the government has put forward the goal of attaining half of all power needs from renewable energy. The Motley Fool found that, “Electricity from oil-fired power plants costs around 16 cents/KWh versus approximately 9 cents/KWh for solar. And, according to Logan Goldie-Scot, lead Middle East analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance, solar power plants yield an internal rate of return of over 20 percent with oil around $94 a barrel.” The Kingdom is moving forward with photovoltaic power generation. Two years ago, the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology announced that Saudi Arabia is building the world's largest solar-powered desalination plant at Khafji and more such facilities will be built over the coming decade. A discovery by a team of Harvard scientists and engineers may make the goal of a solar powered Saudi future easier to attain. The Harvard team has demonstrated a new type of battery that could fundamentally transform the way electricity is stored on the grid, making power from renewable energy sources such as solar far more economical and reliable. The novel battery technology is described in the journal “Nature.” The report details the new metal-free flow battery that relies on the electrochemistry of naturally abundant, inexpensive, small organic (carbon-based) molecules called quinones, which are similar to molecules that store energy in plants and animals. The mismatch between the availability of sunshine and the variability of demand is the biggest obstacle to getting a large fraction of our electricity from renewable sources. A cost-effective means of storing large amounts of electrical energy could solve this problem. The battery was designed, built, and tested in the laboratory of Michael J. Aziz, Gene and Tracy Sykes Professor of Materials and Energy Technologies at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). Roy G. Gordon, Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Materials Science, led the work on the synthesis and chemical screening of molecules. Alán Aspuru-Guzik, Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, used his pioneering high-throughput molecular screening methods to calculate the properties of more than 10,000 quinone molecules in search of the best candidates for the battery. Quinones are abundant in crude oil as well as in green plants. Flow batteries store energy in chemical fluids contained in external tanks. The two main components - the electrochemical conversion hardware through which the fluids are flowed (which sets the peak power capacity), and the chemical storage tanks (which set the energy capacity) - may be independently sized. Thus the amount of energy that can be stored is limited only by the size of the tanks. With the Kingdom's available wide open spaces, large storage tanks are not a problem. The design permits larger amounts of energy to be stored at lower cost than with traditional batteries. “Our studies indicate that one to two days' worth of storage is required for making solar dispatchable through the electrical grid,” said Aziz. The flow batteries produced previously relied on metals and chemicals that are expensive or difficult to maintain, thus driving up the energy storage costs. The new flow battery developed by the Harvard team uses significantly less expensive chemicals and no precious metals. “The whole world of electricity storage has been using metal ions in various charge states but there is a limited number that you can put into solution and use to store energy, and none of them can economically store massive amounts of renewable energy,” Gordon said. “With organic molecules, we introduce a vast new set of possibilities.” The same technology could also have applications at the consumer level. Co-lead author Michael Marshak, a postdoctoral fellow at SEAS and in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology commented, “Imagine a device the size of a home heating oil tank sitting in your basement. It would store a day's worth of sunshine from the solar panels on the roof of your house, potentially providing enough to power your household from late afternoon, through the night, into the next morning, without burning any fossil fuels.” Team leader Aziz said the next steps in the project will be to further test and optimize the system that has been demonstrated on the bench top and bring it toward a commercial scale. He concluded: “The intermittent renewables storage problem is the biggest barrier to getting most of our power from the sun and the wind. A safe and economical flow battery could play a huge role in our transition off fossil fuels to renewable electricity. I'm excited that we have a good shot at it.”
