Plan to commercialize supercapacitors in the next few years
Blocks of cement infused with a form of carbon similar to soot could store enough energy to power whole households. A single 3.5-meter block could hold 10kWh of energy, and power a house for a day, and the technology could be commercialized in a matter of years, the scientists say.
Hope this works out. It would be amazing to see new construction using this in foundations. Built in energy storage.
The team worked out that a 45 cubic meter material block of nanocarbon-black-doped concrete would have enough capacity to store about 10kWh of energy
Try to visualise 45 cubic meters for the energy storage for 1 person for 1 day without any heating/cooling
3x3x5 is like a storage unit for a family
Okay and now I need eleven of these, our house of 4 uses 110kwh per day
Per day?!
Wow. Our house of two adults and two kids use 27kwh per day…
Yeah it’s cold so the heat pump air conditioning takes about 80kwh each day to heat the house to 17-18C
Classic Australian winter
Direct link to paper: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2304318120
Not my field but takeaways from a quick glace are that they note that the more energy dense they make it the worse it is at being concrete, and that their 10kwh number needs 45m³ of concrete. That would be 15x15x0.2m or like 55ftx55ftx8in which isn’t crazy but it’s a pretty decent amount.
not at all defending or praising the idea, but I’m very sure the foundation of my house is larger than that.