Kind: captions
Language: en
[Music]
as a resource solar energy seems almost
too good to be true it's clean renewable
and there's plenty of it in fact enough
strikes the Earth in an hour to provide
everyone on the planet with electricity
for a year but only a tiny percentage of
our electricity is made with solar
energy you might think this is due to a
shortage of solar panels but even if we
covered all of Earth's surface with them
we still couldn't rely entirely on solar
energy
you see solar panels only work when the
Sun is up at night we'd still need to
turn to fossil fuels like coal and
natural gas to keep the electricity
flowing but what if we had a way to
store all the solar energy that hits
Earth during the day if we had batteries
that could be recharged daily by the sun
we'd be one giant step closer to kicking
our fossil fuel addiction you might be
asking yourself but don't we already
have that technology
why don't we just make bigger versions
of the batteries we already have
unfortunately it's not that simple
scaling up the batteries we already have
would be super expensive especially in
comparison to fossil fuels so the Big
Challenge right now is how do we create
a cheap battery that can also do a few
really important things what are they
well first of all they need to be
capable of incredibly high power in
order to release lots of energy quickly
this is important since our demand for
energy shifts all the time based on
conditions like the weather season and
time of day these batteries should also
have something called high energy
density which is the ability to hold
lots of energy in a small space real
estate is expensive so we want to get
the most bang for our buck on top of
that they need to have high cycle
durability that's the toughness to
withstand Decades of daily recharging
you know how your cell phone battery
seems to run out a lot quicker after
it's a few years old well that's the
kind of thing we need to avoid coming up
with a cost effective design that even
comes close to accomplishing all that is
no small feat so it's easy to understand
our love affair with fossil fuels
they're cheap and convenient sources of
energy we've relied on for most of human
history in fact they're kind of like
batteries we find in the ground only not
renewable and terrible for the
environment also they're almost gone at
our current rate of consumption the
Earth's coal oil and natural gas will be
completely exhausted by the end of this
Century with this looming fossil fuel
shortage solar energy seems more
desirable than ever but we won't be able
to harness its vast potential if we
don't have solar storage to keep the
lights on when the Sun goes down
[Music]