Today Google It is one of those great technology companies that, in addition to naming the famous search engine, the truth is that it is closely related to the development of very innovative technologies, their discovery and especially their commercialization. Due to this, it is not surprising that the famous company does not hesitate to make all kinds of investments each time in more different fields.
On this occasion from Google they surprise us with the idea of being able to develop both the methodology and the technology necessary to achieve storing renewable energy using salt. The idea may seem quite peculiar or different, although the truth is that it is more than necessary that this energy can be stored in some way since, today, the energy that is not used ends up being wasted.
Google's 'special forces' will take charge of managing to develop a storage system for renewable energy
To carry out this project, as has been revealed by several officials of the American company itself, the expert researchers of the special laboratory X of the company, who have been working on it for several months developing it and demonstrating that their idea can provide interesting advantages, such as these storage systems can be located anywhere, have the potential to last longer than lithium-ion batteries being, even, able to compete in price with the new hydroelectric plants and other methods of storing clean energy.
As you can see, Google has taken very seriously the need to store and not waste all that renewable energy produced today by numerous plants. For this, it is quite striking that they have put to work on the project nothing less than their most advanced research laboratory, which, as you will surely remember and among other things, has been responsible for developing different technologies such as car without motorthe famous Google Glass that seem to have resurfaced in recent weeks or even the delivery of goods and packages with drones.
While many governments withdraw their investments in renewables, Google is interested in them
Personally, I have to admit that it has caught my attention how, while there are many governments that increasingly reduce their investment in this type of technology, such as Spain, a multinational like Google decides that the time has come to take the witness and go much further in this field. As a detail, tell you that Google hopes that thanks to this support, the renewable energy market will again gain momentum and have a investment of 40.000 million euros by 2024.
In this line I would like to highlight the words of obi felten, director of the Moonshot Factory:
If we start solving a major problem like climate change, there are trillions and trillions of dollars at stake. It is a market opportunity.
This new plant would work by converting electrical energy into hot and cold air currents
Going into a little more detail, I would like us to talk about the system proposed by the Google researchers, which would work absorbing energy in the form of electricity to later convert it into hot and cold air currents. In this way, the salt would first heat while the cold air would be in charge of cooling the antifreeze.
This achieves that, because the salt maintains its temperature, the system can store energy for hours and even days. This year the system is expected to have capacity to store up to 790 megawatts of energy and this capacity is expected to reach 45 gigawatts of global capacity in one seven years.
Undoubtedly a quite interesting solution, especially if we take into account that, in preliminary studies, it is calculated that a state such as California during the first half of the year would have disposed of more than 300.000 megawatts that would have been produced by solar panels and wind farms.
Further information: Bloomberg