By 2020, residents of California will have to comply with a new law that requires them to incorporate solar panels into their new homes.
The California Energy Commission voted to approve the new legislation yesterday. Now passed, it will make the sun-drenched state the first in the U.S. state to mandate the installation of solar panels.
The solar-energy regulations could cause the cost of the construction of new homes to soar by up to $30,000. However, homeowners would save up to $60,000 in the long run from using solar power.
Scalable and Cheap Saltwater Batteries
Until other states follow suit, Californians better start looking for an efficient solar energy storage system.
It just so happens that one of California’s leading research centers has been working on renewable saltwater batteries that could ease a lot of these costs.
When it comes to a home battery for renewables, there are a few main concerns that any storage solution must answer: how much electricity it can store, how much energy is lost on charge and discharge, and for how long can the system operate.
Materials scientists at Stanford University developed a manganese-hydrogen storage technique to accommodate solar and wind-generated power.
The new saltwater batteries are easy to produce as they only require manganese sulfate (a type of salt), water, and simple electrodes for the necessary catalytic reactions to take place.
“What we’ve done,” said Yi Cui, who led the research, “is thrown a special salt into water, dropped in an electrode, and created a reversible chemical reaction that stores electrons in the form of hydrogen gas.”
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