FORT DEVENS — These days we plug in everything: phones, flashlights, cameras — sometimes even our cars. We keep recharging them because, with electricity, you either “use it or lose it” unless you store power in a battery.
“The electric grid is the only supply chain in the world where you need to generate electricity and consume it at the exact same time,” says Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources Commissioner Judith Judson.
By 2020, DOER is requiring electric utilities in the state to procure large-scale storage systems for some of the electricity they generate. Just how much is yet to be decided. What technology they use is up to them.
Now, a novel liquid battery is potentially offering unlimited storage capacity.
Power From A ‘Goddess’
If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, you can see it by the truckload parked behind an Army Reserve building at Fort Devens. Inside, two 53-foot-long shipping containers are huge tanks filled with vanadium — the element named after the Scandinavian goddess of beauty.
“The vanadium, the beautiful part about it is the liquid changes color,” says Vionx Energy CEO David Vieau. “It’s like a rainbow goes through as you charge it. It changes. We can actually tell charge state by the color of the liquid.”
Vieau’s Woburn-based company has been testing a novel kind of battery at Devens for the military that stores energy in liquid form.
“This was an early system that the Army wanted to do to begin to understand from a microgrid standpoint how could they get an independent energy capability,” Vieau explains. “Could you get something that would allow them to get separated from the grid?”
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