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"The question right now is the market for it," says

March 15, 2018 by Carolyn Mueller

"The question right now is the market for it," says David Trenberth, research director at the GT and Georgia Institute of Technology and an adviser to the G&T team. The GT research group hopes to start with a new type of nickel-hydrogen battery with a lithium-ion battery and then a nickel-hydrogen battery that can be powered only from nickel.

That's a tough sell for solar developers because of their high cost, but there's a lot of research in the field for other battery designs, like lithium-ion batteries that can be used to power a huge array of sensors and data centers and for storage and transmission.

In fact, the research group has been looking at both battery technology and battery chemistry for years.

To get a better idea of scale and cost, Trenberth and his colleagues have turned to a new type of nickel-hydrogen battery that's made by using a special type of nickel material called bismuth. When used in its current form, this material is extremely stable and can withstand the extreme stresses that occur in a battery—especially for high-intensity power plants. "It's about 10 times stronger than bismuth if you include the nickel," says Trenberth. "We're doing the same thing with lithium-ion batteries."

In order to keep the current levels at the low levels necessary to power a huge array of sensors and data centers, the new material can be used by battery companies. But it will require a higher-voltage load to operate at a lower output. This is why the researchers want to use bismuth as the new battery material.

While bismuth is a very strong material, it's not strong enough to be used in a large-scale power plant. It is also very brittle and doesn't tolerate a very high voltage, so the scientists are trying to develop a battery designed to withstand those stresses.

The research team plans to start testing the bismuth material in a lab in the fall. In the meantime, the researchers currently hope to use bismuth in their new battery to help them improve battery chemistry.

As Trenberth notes, the next step is to figure out the cost of the bismuth material. He and his colleagues want to compare its performance compared to other forms of bismuth, such as lithium-ion.

The research team is also looking to figure out how much of the bismuth material it needs to make a difference. "Our research is very