10 The Electric Battery
goes down, the lights.34 If a residential rooftop solar array could store the
generated during the midday hours for the early evening, these electricity
households could rely a lot less on their grid ties. That’s not to mention
another clear benefit of home storage—keeping the lights on during a
blackout. In Chapter 5, we’ll take a deeper dive into how batteries can solve
these intermittency issues for homes and other distributed applications.
On a more macro scale, the problem is similar, if a bit more complex.
Consider a 200-megawatt solar farm that feeds into the grid. Besides the
more basic challenges of matching the supply to the customer demand
throughout the local grid, there is the issue of more dynamic intermittency.
On a partially cloudy day, this type of larger-scale solar farm can give grid
operators the fits, as up to 200 megawatts of electricity are coming on and
offline as the clouds pass over the panels.
Wind farms pose the same challenge. Wind doesn’t always blow and
spin the turbines when the customers want to use the power, and even
when the wind is blowing, it can be irregular and constantly changing the
wind farm’s output.
Storing this wind or solar power when it is generated—whether through
batteries or alternative means—then lets grid operators tap into the supply
when it is needed. In Chapter 6 we’ll take a much closer look at storage at
the grid level.
The Electric Battery: A Very Brief History
Before we dive deeper into battery technology and its future uses, let’s
take a closer look at its historical development including some of its inno-
vators who have been leading the battery’s charge forward. It’s generally
accepted that the electric battery as we currently recognize it was inven
ted by Alessandro Volta in 1800.35 In the mid- to late eighteenth century,
the world was fascinated with electricity, and scientists were racing to har-
ness it for practical use. In 1745, static electricity was first stored. Ewald
Georg von Kleist of Germany and Dutch scientist Pieter van Musschen-
broek both independently (and accidentally) figured out how to store a
charge and produce a spark in a jar partially filled with water. Early ver-
sions of the Leyden jar (named after Musschenbroek’s city of residence in
the Netherlands) were glass jars filled with water and lined with metal foil,
with a nail or metal rod protruding down through the lid into the fluid (see
Figure 1.2). When an electrostatic generator touched the metal rod, it put
a charge into the jar, which could store the charge for hours and deliver a
considerable shock to the experimenter who later touched the rod. Von
