Using Only Salt and Water, This Battery Offers a Cheaper Option to Store Solar and Wind Energy Stanford researchers developed a prototype so far but claims it can be scaled up. Storing both solar and wind energy can be expensive nowadays, that is why researchers in the field of renewable energy search for the best alternatives that are cheap and scalable. Now, folks at Stanford University have discovered what is considered as a material, although small as of writing, that could change the way we store solar and wind energy in batteries. Yi Cui, a professor of materials science at Stanford and senior author on the paper, and Wei Chen, a postdoctoral scholar in Cui’s lab, developed a manganese-hydrogen battery that
is only three inches tall which can generate 20 milliwatt hours of electricity. While the prototype seems little a capacity for a battery, the researchers claim that they can take this technology up to an industrial-grade system that could charge and recharge up to 10,000 times or last more than a decade. “What we’ve done 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,” Cui said. The salt, which is manganese sulfate, is a cheap, abundant industrial salt typically used