If you remember, there was a certain company founded by a certain Professor Don Sadoway, who invented a molten salt battery designed specifically for the power grid. The battery had two liquid metal electrodes with molten salt as the electrolyte. Well, now the company renamed itself to Ambri, and is being backed up by Bill Gates.
Gates wanted to meet and invest in Sadoway after he subscribed to his online classes at MIT. The battery is low-cost enough to be used for storing excess renewable energy for grid applications, a field that is desperately needed to evolve right now.
Sadoway says a final product will be ready in about two years, and Cambridge, the University where all this first started, is very proud to have its name derived to Ambri (its core).
What’s interesting is that oil company Total also invested in this renewable energy application, along with Bill gates, Khosla Venturea and ARPA-E’s $6.9 million.
via cleantechnica
Could a molten salt solar thermal installation heat up the salt and inject it directly into the molten battery? Could the thermal energy then be switched chemically to electricity directly or stored directly, without having to heat water then spin a turbine to create electricity? Would this be a more efficient way to transfer the energy??
Something every home should one day install with eventually uber cheap, highly efficient solar panels and we’re good to go