Blackberries store the sun too, and later release it as wine or jam :)
I’d personally want to understand that before making any big plans, but this sounds cool.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aec6413
"Upon treatment with acid, that bond breaks to release more than a megajoule per kilogram of the compound, enough to rapidly boil water from a solution."
That's from the editor's summary (I haven't had time to read the paper).
> When exposed to a trigger -- such as a small amount of heat or a catalyst -- the molecule snaps back into its original form, releasing the stored energy as heat.
From the paper abstract, the catalyst is HCl. I don't have access to the full paper, so I don't know how they separate the HCl from the MOST to neutralize it to be rechargeable again.
The reaction triggered by heat doesn't release all the stored energy, which would be the bigger concern for unintended runaway reactions.
Still, if it could be stored stably in the summer and converted to heat in the winter then possibly helpful.
I wonder how the efficiencies compare to producing hydrogen or other burnable gases.
That being said, there are some "hot rocks" companies who have been working with thermoptovoltaic cells. Which could still work, but the low hanging fruit is in the millions of direct uses for heat.
There are already sand batteries that store heat well and are used in northern climates: https://polarnightenergy.com/news/worlds-largest-sand-batter...
The capex per unit of stored energy in undoubtedly far too high for that to be worthwhile. Seasonal energy storage requires extremely low cost storage media.
I remember thinking, in my youth, that the technology that enabled CASIO calculation would one day be applied as well to a bigger Turing machine, but I'm yet to see a solar-powered computer.
I sure wish it'd happen, though. All these magic solar energy storage/conversion systems need to start showing up on SOM/SOC's, imho ..
It runs off a 25cm square solar panel screwed to a wall that only receives direct illumination for 5 hours a day, and is not in any way optimised beyond 'that looks roughly like it's pointing at the sun'.
Works great!
absent of a major breakthrough solar will always be a house/grid level technology, which is fine and works at scale
This MOST process doesn't immediately look like it has home-scale applications (maybe in cold climates), but for heat to make steam, promising.
you need a massive efficiency improvement to overcome this
we're still in the calculators and tv remotes level of on-device solar
That's a bit concerning. Runaway waiting to happen.
there are a huge number of things that can store energy, chemicaly ,and reversibly, but the gotchas are always lurking, exotic wildly expensive ingedients, dangerous failure modes , or very complicated operational requirements that will not scale into the real world. this anouncent makes clear that is is based on dna, which is no surprise as nature is the ancient master of chemical energy storage,and which all of us useing right now anyway
