MIT researchers create new energy storage system

MIT researchers say they have developed an energy storage system that could allow homes to store their own power without external batteries and highways to charge electric vehicles as they traveled on the road — no charging stations needed. And the best part, the researchers say, is their system, called a supercapacitor, could be built from three of the world’s most abundant materials: cement, water, and carbon. The researchers, who work at MIT’s Concrete Sustainability Hub, recently reported their breakthrough in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a peer-reviewed scientific journal. They detailed how a tiny prototype — around 1 centimeter wide and 1 millimeter thick — powered an LED light at least 10,000 times. The next step: developing large-scale supercapacitors to store wind, solar, and other renewable energy to help accelerate the transition from fossil fuels. “Energy storage is a global problem,” said Franz-Josef Ulm, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at MIT and one of the creators of the supercapacitor. “If we want to curb the environmental footprint, we need to get serious and come up with innovative ideas to reach these goals.” The supercapacitor, still years from commercialization, is part of the drive to improve storage systems considered critical to modernizing the power grid and do it with cheap, widely available materials. In 2022, MIT released a report saying that storing renewable energy at the scale needed to wean the world from fossil fuels was financially and technologically possible. But the cost and difficulty of obtaining critical components such as lithium, cobalt, and rare earth minerals pose significant challenges to achieving that goal, researchers said. But engineers at MIT are not the only ones looking to solve this problem. Form Energy, a green energy supplier in Somerville, is developing batteries based on iron — another abundant material. Other MIT researchers, who founded the Marlborough startup Ambri, have developed a liquid-metal battery, which uses common materials such as calcium. — MACIE PARKER