A good news for renewable energy industry where a startup company has come up with a low-cost, zero-emissions solution to the thorny issue surrounding what happens when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing.
Paradoxically, the more the world embraces clean energy like solar and wind, the more it must also embrace something markedly less-clean—diesel fuel or batteries.
When a reliable grid power by fossil fuel is absent, diesel generators might be used to cover the hours of darkness when solar panels cease providing electricity.
Therefore, it is important to store the energy generated from the sun during the day in batteries, but a serious recycling problem also exist, where batteries require rare earth minerals obtained from environmentally-destructive mining operations.
According to Jonas Eklind, CEO of Azelio, the Swedish energy, “Batteries are very expensive to store power for a 24 hour period”. However, the startup has potentially solved this problem. The best solution to store a lot of renewable energy is thermal energy.
In the forward-thinking countries of Scandinavia, Azelio adapted an old Volvo assembly line factory to manufacture their patented, industry-first thermal energy storage system that allow people to keep the energy generated by their standard PV solar panels during the day so they can use it in evenings.
Instead of the critical energy storage component using rare and expensive minerals, the Azelio system uses recycled aluminum, which emits nothing and it is also cheaper than lithium, and—as Jonas said during an interview with GNN—“only lasts 62,000 years.”
Photons absorbed by solar panels on your roof enter into the system where an aluminum alloy is heated so it moves from a solid to a liquid. The, allowing the storage of an incredibly dense amount of energy within the material, which is sent as heat into the Stirling Generator and turned into electricity on demand with zero emissions and at a lower cost.
Unlike the fossil fuels, uranium rods or pellets, or diesel fuel, because the energy in the aluminum can constantly be melted and hardened again to produce or store energy.
With its high energy density, the material has the ability to store energy for a longer period of time, while the aluminum suffers no degradation in capacity over time.
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