Plan to commercialize supercapacitors in the next few years
A solution that is inexpensive, scales, is not inconvenient, and fits household demands? What’s the catch?
I hope it’s as good as it sounds and becomes a thing.
One of the big catches is how Greenhouse gas intensive concrete production is
concrete seems to be used here for its structural properties, just like we do it today. Their solution doesn’t seem to require it:
If more powerful capacitors are required, they can be made with a larger concentration of carbon black, at the expense of some structural strength. This could be useful for applications where the concrete is not playing a structural role or where the full strength potential of concrete is not required. For applications such as a foundation, or structural elements of the base of a wind turbine, the “sweet spot” is around 10 percent carbon black in the mix, the team says.
And how greenhouse gas intensive is carbon black production?
If you’re releasing CO2 you’re losing carbon.
If you make it with electricity it’s effectively a carbon sink.
If it’s just a byproduct of other industries, like existing coal power plants, it might be seen as carbon neutral. And lithium batteries also use it.
Carbon black is produced bij burning a hydrocarbon with a limited amount of air. It’s not a byproduct, but uses organic materials. This can be of renewable sources like vegetable oil, but it is made a lot from the heavy fractions in fossil oil.
I think the idea here is to bake it into construction that would happen anyway. If you just need energy storage, keep using batteries. But if you’re pouring a foundation already, why not also turn that foundation into a battery?
I mean, there’s a reason why we’ve taken so long with even electric cars lol I hope this becomes a reality, but moneyed interests will fight tooth and nail.
The team worked out that a 45 cubic meter material block of nanocarbon-black-doped concrete would have enough capacity to store about 10kWh
10kWh is enough to run a house for a day, how much concrete would be in a house with concrete walls?
naturally it depends on the walls and house layout, but just to have an idea: assuming a concrete thickness of 20cm and 4 external walls of 20m x 3m each:
0.2 * 4 * 20 * 3 = 48m^3
probably in the 100-200m^3 ballpark if we count internal walls, which are thinner, but cover more total length.
For a basement with a 5-inch slab and exterior walls are 8 inches, 8ft high and also concrete… Then 45 cubic meters is about what you’d need.
Of course, your basement walls are about as electrically grounded as it gets, so I doubt you’d be able to store power in them. One leak and you’re discharging all that power into the groundwater.
I wonder if the foundation of the house would be convenient for this… that much concrete is equivalent to a cube of side length around 10 feet, which seems to at least be in the ballpark for the total amount of concrete in a foundation. I think?
10kWh is enough to run one 110VAC outlet at full capacity for about 10 hours. I don’t know where that 10kWh figure comes from but most American houses use between 15-30kWh per day.
So that 10 foot cube would need to be closer to 15ft cubed. It’s huge. Perhaps the foundation of the structure would work, as someone else mentioned.
UK average is 8 kWh / 24 hours for electricity per household of 2.4 people.
The catch is, if it works some oil company is gonna buy it out and kill it.
One catch is that carbon black is mostly made from fossil oil.
The last time this news was posted everyone tore into it. I don’t remember the details, but it was funny.
It’s just not feasible in reality.
Blocks of cement infused with a form of carbon similar to soot could store enough energy to power whole households. A single 3.5-meter block could hold 10kWh of energy, and power a house for a day, and the technology could be commercialized in a matter of years, the scientists say.
This kind of shit comes out of MIT daily and never manifests into reality. They’ve got a great PR team.
Just try this as an exercise. Keep a journal of how many world changing batteries are presented by the MIT PR department from today, through one year. Three years later, open the journal and see how many have found any meaningful application in the real world.
You gave a link to the MIT PR department. Like, yeah, that’s my point. They are phenomenal at tooting their own horn. But the conversion rate to there actually being a there there is extremely low.
Oh I see! Fair enough.
Hope this works out. It would be amazing to see new construction using this in foundations. Built in energy storage.
I thought this was going to be the thing where they use cheap power to raise big weights and then generate power from gravity lowering them.
In general those are a bad idea. A lot of complexity for not much power storage.
Presurized caverns or pumped storage are much better version of that idea.
Technology Connections over here like: IT’S CALLED A WATER HEATER!
I adore his mid-western pragmatism.
The team worked out that a 45 cubic meter material block of nanocarbon-black-doped concrete would have enough capacity to store about 10kWh of energy, which is reckoned to be the average daily electricity usage for a household, so remote off-grid houses with batteries in the foundations could operate using windmills or solar panels.
That’s ~1600ft^3 for those unfortunate enough to have an innate sense of freedom units and not logical units; a lot of concrete!
I’m very curious about the longevity and durability of these bricks, and safety considerations. Such a house could potentially, (pun intended,) instantly discharge a lot of electricity into someone who comes in to contact with its foundation. Don’t use that masonry drill, it might kill you!
Or alternatively, can it even discharge fast enough to provide a meaningful enough amount of electricity?
What does the charge/ discharge cycle do to the integrity of the concrete?
What special conditions are necessary for is curing? Whats the yield? Because the consequences of having a 45 cubic meter block of concrete that was supposed to be a battery sitting in my yard but isn’t are not trivial.
Whats the carbon footprint of adding 45 additional cubic meters of concrete to every structure? It takes a shit ton of energy to rip off the necessary electrons from lime stone to make lime.
They’re saying it coule be part of the foundation.
Basically for the average American house I think that would just be a slightly thicker foundation (if it could work like that)
This is really exciting if it works out and gets commercialised widely! One thing I’m not sure I understand is whether this requires entirely new cement, or if somehow the carbon black and capacitors can be mixed into existing cement structures (especially roads)? As mentioned in the article, cement is a high emission product and we already have so much of it in the world.
It would require adding carbon black in the correct proportions during initial mixing, so new concrete only. The structure that functions like a supercap is formed during curing.
Direct link to paper: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2304318120
Not my field but takeaways from a quick glace are that they note that the more energy dense they make it the worse it is at being concrete, and that their 10kwh number needs 45m³ of concrete. That would be 15x15x0.2m or like 55ftx55ftx8in which isn’t crazy but it’s a pretty decent amount.
not at all defending or praising the idea, but I’m very sure the foundation of my house is larger than that.
The team worked out that a 45 cubic meter material block of nanocarbon-black-doped concrete would have enough capacity to store about 10kWh of energy
Try to visualise 45 cubic meters for the energy storage for 1 person for 1 day without any heating/cooling
3x3x5 is like a storage unit for a family
Okay and now I need eleven of these, our house of 4 uses 110kwh per day
Per day?!
Wow. Our house of two adults and two kids use 27kwh per day…
Yeah it’s cold so the heat pump air conditioning takes about 80kwh each day to heat the house to 17-18C
Classic Australian winter
