This will work great as long as they can get wind-power virtually free. I am not sure what they will do with these units when modern and cost-effective grid-storage equipment becomes available. Since current P2G seemingly has horrible efficiency (starting with water splitting at 20-30% efficiency), a 75-85% grid-battery (Durathon, EOS) will beat this in efficiency many times over.

Finally, the first next-gen li-ion anode material has reached the market. I hope we will hear about the countless other breakthrough materials we have read about in the recent years.

Sounds extremely promising. Is there any info about the roundtrip efficiency? Flow batteries are usually very weak in that area (60%-70% roundtrip eff) Also, this design seems easy to maintain after the 2000 cycles are gone (replacing the flow-through cell and possibly the electrolyte).

Experts say that to stop climate change at 2C rise, 2/3 of the current reserves must stay in the ground. The Saudis don't seem to care about this too much. In the worst case, in 10-20 years these refineries will have to be bombed to shut down (I just don't think the Saudis will shut them down willingly).

@Davemart Oh common, let HarveyD keep up the morale.

Even the 79% efficiency is pretty good for 50C, flow batteries manage ~70-80% at 5C. What about self-discharge? Is this viable for longer-term storage like with the flow batteries? Would be nice to see some cost calculations to tell if this is really a breakthrough but it does look very good on paper. If there is no degradation at all for 1000 cycles, this may mean that the battery can serve 10-20K cycles or even more. This may make the real-life LCOE of renewable energy sources very competitive since it eliminates (finally) the variability factors.

Would be nice to see the capacity at 100, 500 and 1000 cycles.

@jayson Your "economist" thinking is beyond repair. Your statements are problematic in so many ways that its is hard even to start correcting them. Wind is more expensive than nuclear? Really? What a surprise. I suppose your "economist" calculations include all hidden or externalized costs like decomissioning nuclear power plants? Eh, never mind!

Sorry guys, but as far as I understand, this is not even similar to the thing EESTOR is/was developing. They never had to do anything with lithium particles. They claimed to have found a solution for an extremely energy dense capacitor by allegedly finding material which avoids voltage breakdown at extreme energy capacities/voltage.

The article doesn't say anything about how they get the CO2 for their process? Although, their process seems revolutionary, the source of CO2 is the catch here (just like with algae-growth) Do they need a coal-fired power plant to feed them CO2? In this case, their solution is nice but it is only an advanced form of carbon-capture (and reuse). Can they suck CO2 out of the air? If their process can be viably combined with a solar-powered suction system, then I would call this revolutionary.

@Nick Possibly, the service stations will have huge capacitors and high-amp connections to the grid. Stations with sparsely populated areas (highway stations) may also have a solar-wind dual power station for themselves (e.g: a 5 MW single-wind tower with a similar-wattage solar part), so they can fill the average number of stopping cars without drawing huge amps from the grid.

The charging power in flow batteries is usually proportionate with the number of "fuel cells" you put in the system (in relation with the amount of the electrolyte). For example, you can create a system which has a huge amount of electrolyte storage but only a few charge/discharge cells. In this case you will still have huge electric storage capacity but only limited charge/discharge power. If you add cells to the system you raise the power of the system. I hope this will be more successful than Vanadium-redox batteries (VRB) because those have been around for 10 years but haven't become successful. (They are still very expensive and no big player seems to have the capability to lower those prices by mass production). Would be nice to see some more quantitative data. VRB has about 60-70% roundtrip efficiency. This lithium based system may reach 90% if the energy density is really so much bigger in the active material.

This may be an important consideration: If methanation is used in conjunction to wind farms (instead of the wind farms producing for the electric grid) then wind capacity factor may soar up and simultaneously reduce its production price. Methanation may be done at the wind-farm so electric grid connection is not necessary at all (an important factor for project siting, currently). If CO2 production from the atmosphere could be made cost effective, CNG use would explode.

I wouldn't write this off as a complete nonsense. Methanating energy is not a new idea, only its known processes are not very efficient yet, so it is expensive. In this process, almost everything depends on the price of the electricity they use for electrolysis. If they can get electricity dirt-cheap (excess wind can be bough for NEGATIVE payments at some places, see the recent CleanTechnica article), this may even prove financially viable, especially if the German government supports it. And why wouldn't it? If it really provides a way for a 60% CO2 emission reduction compared to the Prius (~100g/km), then why not? By the way, recently, a lot of articles have reported breakthroughs about producing H2 from solar energy using cheap catalysts. This may replace the hydrolysis process element in the medium term and make methanation MUCH MORE efficient/cheap. About storage: Here in Hungary energy companies have built HUGE storage facilities (enough for 6 months for the whole country) in response to the two recent Ukrainian-Russan CNG dispute (CNG import lines were cut off for months). We can store extreme amounts of CNG so a system like this may be absolutely feasible if other parts of the process are financially viable. (Also there are quite a lot of CNG vehicles on Hungarian roads because it is still much cheaper than gas/diesel). Gas is $8,15/us gallon here. Diesel is almost the same.

I have a Toyota Prius and I like it very much. However, I WILL NOT buy a car which has anything to do with MICROSOFT. Not necessarily because it is bad quality (although MS software is not very reliable according to my experience) but because I won't tolerate the business behaviour of such firms. If you care about progress and free competition, just refrain from MS software as much as you can.

It is promising that heat-treated GNSs are similar in performance as platinum. Would be nice to know if their price can be made lower than platinum or not, since anything at the price level of platinum may be worthless for mass-market applications. There was an article here not so long ago, that GNSs can be made cost effectively with a novel process, I don't know if that made it to the industry. Do I understand correctly, that the cycle life of the cell they created is good for at least 180 cycles (lower 2 diagrams)? Because that would be huge for a Li-Air rechargeable battery. Especially if someone works out a way to regenerate the batteries cost-effectively after a couple of hundred cycles.

If they come out with an affordable fuel cell which works with methanol, they may even make fuel cells successful. Methanol is much-much easier to handle. Sounds like a HUGE discovery for the fuel-cell crowd.

@greenplease Yes, both the power density and the energy density is quite low, so this is absolutely for stationary applications. However, this can work extremely-large-scale while a lot of battery/fuel-cell technologies seem to have problem with scaling.

It is a good thing that not many charging stations have been deployed so far because when these batteries appear, they would have to be replaced completely tin order to deal with 2-5 minutes of full charges on 20kwh batteries.

I mean "large underground water reservoir".

Do I understand correctly, that this process could be the basis of a continuous solar power-plant? The boiling/precipitation cycle could be emulated in an artificial environment (a power plant). I would think that one can convert seawater into freshwater by boiling it with concentrated solar rays and move the steam to a cooler place to make it precipitate quickly (a large underwater water reservoir). Possibly precipitation could be done by forcing steam through the water reservoir (though the energy need for this may be too high so a slower method may be more effective). By this salt/fresh conversion, the process could be closed loop, only the solar energy would come from the outside. If one can store huge amount of fresh/salt water (separated from each other) near the power plant, then the power plant could serve power after the night (only the freshwater supply would decrease and the seawater supply increase until boiling can be restarted in the morning by the solar concentrator arrays). Based on the article, 1 m3 water could store ~0,6Kwh energy (2200 KJoule). One of the new water reservoirs here in Hungary has a capacity of ~94 million m3, so in theory, this could hold 56,4 Gwh of energy. If we take only 30% efficiency for the process (steam pumping...etc) and we take only half of the size, we are still talking about 8,4 Gwh which is a huge amount of energy. Naturally, a much-much smaller reservoir would be enough for a smaller powerplant. The Desertec project may just have found the ideal process for their power plants.

I believe, electrode-rejuvenated batteries would be ideal for Project Better Place if the rejuvenating process can be automated. Since they already swap batteries when they are discharged, they can design an automated anode/cathode rejuvenating process which may even take place in their swap stations (so no need to ship them to a central location). In the BP model, a 1000 mile battery with 15 recharge cycle electrode-life-span is absolutely good enough (in fact, for BP, 1 cycle is good-enough for a 1K battery if the rejuvenating process is robotised in the swap station). These batteries would make the BP business model work over large distances/areas as well, since you could go 1000 miles before you make a swap (a 5 minute exercise). If BP and a serious battery developer/producer invested heavily into this kind of batteries, EVs could become competitive with ICE in no time and their production/sale would explode.

14% may be good enough to be competitive with PV.

If this can be done cheapo, it could even give solar panels, Stirling and other CSP a run for their money. Huge amount of heat can be easily produced even without concentrating the sun (simple black metal absorbers).

Yes, that implies that capacity drops with lower temperature. So this may not be ideal for cold climates or needs extra measures to keep it warm. However, this may not be an insurmountable challenge. The Xebra battery has similar issue.