Performance Enhancement of Solid Oxide Storage Battery

Energy production from renewable resources such as sun and wind has received increasing attention as an essential element of future clean energy infrastructure and an important step toward conserving limited resources of fossil fuel and reducing emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases resulting from burning fossil fuel [1, 2]. However, most renewable energy sources are well known to be climate-dependent. The rate of electricity production is variable even on a minute-to-minute basis [3]. More importantly, the highest rate of electricity production often does not match peak-load demand by the utility grid, causing the entire system to be inefficient and unreliable. Therefore, developing a technical ability to effectively balance the production and consumption of renewable electricity is a key to sustain renewable energy industry. One of the effective solutions is the energy storage. As a contribution to energy storage, a new concept of storage battery solid oxide redox flow battery – has been recently developed for stationary electrical energy storage [4]. Figure 1 shows the working principles of this new type of battery. As a strong competitor for those existing batteries for stationary application, such as redox flow battery (RFB) [5] and NaS/ZEBRA battery (NSB) [6], this new battery has been demonstrated to have high energy capacity and high round-trip efficiency, no volume change on electrodes, low cost and environmentally benign and thermal cycling friendly, etc.