Storing Energy In MGA Muffins
The simple and cheap MGA cubes resemble chocolate muffins. Thanks to their high heat conductivity they are perfect for storing surplus energy.
Image by Iván Tamás from Pixabay
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At some point in your life, you have probably heard that renewable energy is great. But it has its problems. Among the largest is the fact that to use renewable energy properly we need effective technologies capable of storing energy. This is because the Sun, wind, or even waves don’t produce energy only when we need it. Over time, we have seen many interesting solutions to store energy – massive lithium-ion batteries, molten salts, or even enormous towers that would use kinetic energy as storage.
Now, engineers from the University of Newcastle in Australia came up with an interesting idea. They created a surprisingly simple and practical system for storing energy based on objects that have a structure sort of similar to chocolate muffins. According to their creators, these muffins are very effective, can be easily made large-scale, are safe, cheap, and even be used in existing coal power stations.
The key to this new technology are Miscibility Gaps Alloys (MGAs) They have a size of 30 by 20 by 16 centimeters and are made from a material with high heat conductivity. This allows you to get easily heated up and thus store energy in them until you cool them down and by doing so produce energy.
To have the MGA cubes work, they need a specific structure made from a solid matrix which keeps it shaped like a cube in which other pieces of matter are spread that melt when it gets heated up and solidifies when they cool down. Altogether, it looks like a chocolate muffin. In these, we could store energy produced by renewable energy sources which are then available even at times when its natural sources cannot produce it or cannot produce enough of it. On top of that, MGA cubes could be used to recycle waste heat in industrial operations or even in power stations.
The heat stored in MGAs can be used to transform water into steam and thus run turbines of generators without the need to burn coal. This is another benefit of MGAs as we could take existing coal power stations and transform them to use MGAs. This “evolution” of coal power stations would allow us to save enormous amounts of capital while improving our environment at the same time.
MGA cubes are made from cheap and common materials. The price of a single MGA cube is just 10 % of a lithium battery the same size while being able to release a similar amount of energy. And to top it off, MGAs are non-toxic, don’t explode, and don’t release any dangerous chemicals. MGA Thermal is already building a factory to produce MGA cubes in South New Wales. They are also working on - in cooperation with the Swiss company E2S Power AG – upgrading European coal power plants.
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