Event: Chinese

Chinese scientists have achieved a breakthrough in “all-iron flow battery” technology that could sharply reduce the cost of storing renewable energy while significantly extending battery lifespan.Lithium costs over 80 times more than iron as a raw industrial material at present. An iron battery may offer a potential solution to one of the biggest bottlenecks in the global energy transition, according to the researchers.A team from the Institute of Metal Research under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) reported the development of a highly stable electrolyte capable of sustaining thousands of charge-discharge cycles with virtually no capacity loss.This is a record performance for the field. The findings were published online by the journal Advanced Energy Materials.“It offers a low-cost, long-life solution for large-scale energy storage,” the institute said in a press release on April 16.The global energy transition faces a critical bottleneck in storing intermittent power from solar and wind farms at a scale sufficient to stabilise the grid.