New flow battery can solve intermittency of wind energy?

One of the major reasons why wind still hasn't become major supplier to the electrical grid is the intermittency of wind energy. In order to overcome the intermittency issue scientists look for various energy storage solutions such as batteries.

There are many ongoing researches that involve all kinds of batteries, with many different materials being used in the process. The key is to create batteries that would be both cheap and efficient enough to make their production economically viable.

The main function that these batteries must perform is to store excess energy and discharging when input drops due to sudden power fluctuations.

The researchers at the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences have recently developed a low-cost, long-life battery that could help overcome the intermittency issue and make wind energy lot more reliable and affordable.

They have developed a new type of "flow battery"  that uses only one stream of molecules that consists of the relatively inexpensive elements lithium and sulfur and does not need a membrane like this is the case with older flow battery types.

The first tests done by this new battery showed encouraging results because battery retained excellent energy-storage performance through more than 2,000 charges and discharges, which is equivalent to more than 5.5 years of daily cycles.

This was done by using a micro system meaning that a utility version of the new battery would have to scale up in order to store many megawatt-hours of energy needed for full-scale field-demonstration unit.