On a gravel road in West Orange, New Jersey, an electric car was traveling at twice the speed of the more traditional vehicles it had overtaken. It was the early 1900s and the driver of this car was Thomas Edison. Although electric cars were not a novelty in the area, most of them were powered by heavy lead-acid batteries, writes the BBC’s British newspaper.
Edison equipped his car with a new type of nickel-iron battery that he hoped would soon spread across the country. It was built on the work of Swedish inventor Ernst Waldemar Jungner, who first patented the nickel-iron battery in 1899. Edison tried to refine the battery for use in the car. It was big and expensive, and then came the internal combustion engine. Edison claimed that the nickel-iron battery is incredibly flexible and can be charged twice as fast as lead-acid batteries. He also had an agreement with Ford Motors to manufacture it, but there were some problems. It was bigger and more expensive. It also released hydrogen during charging, which was considered uncomfortable and dangerous.
Unfortunately, by the time Edison had a more sophisticated prototype, electric vehicles had to compete with fossil fuel vehicles that were capable of covering greater distances. Edison’s agreement with Ford Motors ran on a railroad track, although its battery was still used in certain circles, such as at railway signs, where its bulky size did not interfere with its function. More than a century later, engineers would rediscover the nickel-iron battery as an unpolished diamond. It is now being examined as a response to the enduring challenge of renewable energy: balancing the intermittent nature of clean energy sources such as wind and solar energy.
Isn't hydrogen so bad? And hydrogen once considered a worrying byproduct, can be one of the most useful things in these batteries. In the mid-2010s, a research team at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands found that when electricity passes through a battery while it is charging, it undergoes a chemical reaction that releases hydrogen and oxygen. The team recognized that the reaction was reminiscent of the release of hydrogen from water, called electrolysis. This water-sharing reaction is one way of producing hydrogen as a fuel - and as a completely pure fuel - provided that the energy used to drive the reaction comes from a renewable source.
This makes energy efficiency 80 to 90 percent and the battery extremely durable. The team hopes their discovery can help solve two major challenges related to renewable energy: energy storage and, when the batteries are full, producing clean fuel. Conventional batteries, such as lithium-based ones, can store energy in the short term, but when fully charged, they must release excess, otherwise, they can overheat and degrade their capacity. Nickel-iron, on the other hand, remains stable when fully charged, at which point it can switch to hydrogen production, i.e. it can act as an electrolyzer.
Renewable energy can become a bigger deal than fossil fuels In addition to generating hydrogen, nickel-iron batteries have other useful properties, most notably that they require unusually little maintenance. They are extremely durable, as Edison proved in his early electric car, and some are known to have a lifespan of more than 40 years.
The metals needed to make the batteries - nickel and iron - are also more common, such as cobalt used to make conventional batteries. This can also make renewable energy more profitable. The aim is to further expand and deliver the system to green energy producers such as solar and wind power. Finally, its supporters hope to reach the gigawatt scale, which is equivalent to the energy produced by about 400 utility wind turbines.
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