|
With a growing number of people switching to renewable energy sources, there is an attendant demand for more room to store all this energy – but what was missing in this picture until recently was an environmentally friendly and affordable battery. Enter AquaBattery, a start-up based on the campus of Delft University of Technology, which developed a pioneering product called Blue Battery that runs on nothing but tap water and table salt. The company’s product developer, Emil Goosen: ‘You have to imagine a stack of special membranes pumping water with a specific salt content back and forth. When there is a surplus of renewable energy available, we use the membranes to separate the salt from the water. That way, you end up with one water stream containing a large quantity of dissolved salt and another stream containing just a small amount of salt. This is how you store your energy. As soon as you need to use that energy, you merge the two water streams together, and electricity is generated during this process.’
|