01 August, 2017
The new endeavor though aims to introduce an innovative method of storing energy and tackling the issue of wasting excessive renewable wind and solar power which can't be stored effectively and efficiently with the traditional methods of today.
Alphabet cautiously noted that Malta is not an official X project, akin to its self driving auto initiative (now spun out as Waymo) or Project Loon, but it has been "de-risked" enough to be made public, and for X to openly look for partners to build, operate and connect a commercial-sized prototype to the grid. The biggest concern now affecting renewable energy is to how the electricity produced by solar farms and wind turbines gets stored. It can be scaled from the size of a large garage to a full sized power plant that could provide energy on demand to industrial facilities or data centers.
Here comes Malta, an energy storage technology developed by researchers from Alphabet's subsidiary, X. This technology employs four tanks, two of which are filled with salt while the other two are filled with either antifreeze or hydrocarbon liquid.
Felten is particularly excited about working with companies in China, a voracious energy consumer - and a country where nearly all Google web services are banned. The jet engine part: Flip a switch and the process reverses. The hot air and cold air are pushed towards each other, creating wind that spins a turbine and generates electricity.
Some solar power plants in Spain and Arizona already use molten salt to store energy, said Csala, who claimed the method is "further down the innovation S-curve" than large-scale storage with "very hyped" lithium batteries. "That is super compelling". Thermal salt-based storage has the potential to be several times cheaper than lithium-ion batteries and other existing grid-scale storage technologies, Raj Apte, Malta's head engineer, told Bloomberg.
The project now has the backing of Robert Laughlin, a Nobel prize-winning physcists whose research is the basis for the system.
Progress has, however, been made with lithium-ion batteries, which have seen their prices drop dramatically in recent years. They discussed the idea, and the lab ultimately made a decision to fund the project and build a small team to execute it. Laughin has signed off on the team's designs, and he said his theories have been working with the prototype.
If the idea works, the technology will pitch Alphabet head-to-head against Elon Musk's Tesla, whose high-profile experiments with energy storage are well-documented. "X came in and took a giant bite out of this problem".
