Chinese scientists have achieved a breakthrough in “all-iron flow battery” technology that could sharply reduce the cost of storing renewable energy while significantly extending battery lifespan.
Lithium costs over 80 times more than iron as a raw industrial material at present. An iron battery may offer a potential solution to one of the biggest bottlenecks in the global energy transition, according to the researchers.
A team from the Institute of Metal Research under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) reported the development of a highly stable electrolyte capable of sustaining thousands of charge-discharge cycles with virtually no capacity loss.
This is a record performance for the field. The findings were published online by the journal Advanced Energy Materials.
“It offers a low-cost, long-life solution for large-scale energy storage,” the institute said in a press release on April 16.
The global energy transition faces a critical bottleneck in storing intermittent power from solar and wind farms at a scale sufficient to stabilise the grid.
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