Power Shift: The Battery Revolution Has Begun
Our energy system is based on a rickety 19th-century concept, but a revolution in energy storage is changing that.
IT WAS THE YEAR the Soviet Union collapsed, Osama bin Laden founded al-Qaeda, and the lauded American physicist Richard Feynman died. Murphy Brown debuted on U.S. television, while at the cinema, Rain Man battled it out with Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and Crocodile Dundee II.
And while it doesn’t have quite such a recognition factor, 1988 was also the year Maria Skyllas-Kazacos, an Australian professor of chemical engineering, obtained a U.S. patent for inventing the vanadium redox battery, or VRB.
VRBs are quite something. Unlike traditional lead-acid batteries of the time, or the lithium-ion wonders of today, they store and convert energy separately. They stockpile electricity as chemical energy in two large tanks filled with electrolytic fluids, which are connected to electrochemical cells.
This allows the amount of electricity stored, and the power discharged, to be handled independently. They can be left unused for long periods with no loss of power; and the electrolyte never catches fire, unlike the more temperamental lithium-ion batteries in smartphones today.
