How about this development? If we add a bit of charcoal (actually, carbon black) to cement, that mixture becomes capable of storing energy.
Which means, if we use this concoction in our homes, it should be possible to store a full day’s worth of energy in its concrete foundation. (It can also be included in the foundation of wind turbines. Or, incorporated in our roads, so we can recharge electric cars as they use the highways.) So, when there is no sun or wind to produce electricity, we can still have power for our homes.
These findings were published in PNAS (Proceeding of the National Academy of Science), Carbon–cement supercapacitors as a scalable bulk energy storage solution
Not only could this be an alternative to storing electricity in batteries, the concrete/charcoal mixture has an advantage that it releases energy in a slower fashion than do batteries.
It seems by adding the carbon black to the cement, a network of branching, wire-like structures form in the mixture. Then, the cement is soaked in a common electrolyte (say potassium chloride), the electrolyte settles on that carbon-wire structure, which yields the energy storage potential.
The MIT team (headed by Franz Josef Ulm, with N Chanut, D Stefaniuk, Y Zhu, and A Masi JC Weaver of Harvard was also part of the team ) converted two slabs (1 cm wide, 1 mm thick) with a piece of paper serving as the(insulation layer) between them into a potent superconductor. Three of these slabs could power an LED (they were equivalent to a 3 volt battery).
Their next step is to produce 12 volt power; i.e. supercapacitors, so that larger device can be power source. (A block equivalent to a a 3.5 meter cube would store some 10 kW of energy, or about 1/3 the average daily household demand in the US or 1.25 that obtained in the UK.)
The mixture is capable of working for about 10,000 cycles- or enough for 27 years of use. But, that assumes we can keep the slab wetted with the conductive sale solution. Challenging for the home use and the road use.
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