PARIS – Researchers at Harvard University said they will receive
grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to develop commercially
practical flow batteries to store solar and wind power. A team
of engineers and chemists at Harvard University said they have
won a one-year, $600,000 innovation grant from the U.S.
Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy
(ARPA-E) program to develop a flow battery, a technology that
offers the promises of a cost-effective, grid-scale electrical
energy storage based on eco-friendly small organic molecules.
“Storage of very large amounts of energy is required if we are
to generate a major portion of our electricity from intermittent
renewable sources such as wind turbines and photovoltaics,”
stated lead investigator Michael Aziz, professor of materials
and energy technologies at the Harvard School of Engineering and
Applied Sciences. Aziz continued: “Currently no cost-effective
solution exists to this large-scale storage problem. Flow
batteries may make statio