MIT Engineers Design New Low-Cost Battery For Energy Storage

September 24, 2022

Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineers have designed a battery made from inexpensive, abundant materials, that could provide low-cost backup storage for renewable energy sources. Less expensive than lithium-ion battery technology, the new architecture uses aluminum and sulfur as its two electrode materials with a molten salt electrolyte in between.The new battery architecture is described in the journal Nature, in a paper by MIT Professor Donald Sadoway, along with 15 others at MIT and in China, Canada, Kentucky, and Tennessee.Wind and solar advocates are building out ever larger installations of wind and solar power systems, thus need is growing fast for economical, large-scale backup systems to provide power when the sun is down and the air is calm. Today’s lithium-ion batteries are still too expensive for most such applications, and other options such as…