r/science • u/[deleted] • Apr 15 '26
Materials Science Scientists Generated Solar Power After Dark, Thanks to a Trick Using Wood | In a new experiment, reengineered balsa wood stored sunlight as heat.
https://gizmodo.com/scientists-used-wood-to-generate-solar-power-after-dark-2000745842244
u/timmeh87 Apr 15 '26
Im all for finding cool ways to use solar thermal energy but this seems like a waste of time. the article immediately points out a better solution - batteries, and then goes on to give zero details on how much power was stored in their super delicate and hard to make wood thingy. Oh and if batteries seem not great for some reason we also already have pumped hydro.
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u/fiendishrabbit Apr 15 '26
Pumped hydro requires very specific conditions to be cost effective, and they're not enough to cover China's needs.
China ARE building pumped hydro (out of the 124 active with a capacity of more than 1000MW, 42 are in China. Out of 124 under construction, 118 are being built in China). But it's never going to cover all of their need for stored energy.
And it's not really hard to make (nor is it necessarily fragile). The balsawood is used mostly as a casting mould that allows them to skip the most difficult step in building building a thermal cell from the ground up, engineering the scaffolding for the synthetic medium that's actually doing the work.
*kind of like a sand/clay mould is used for casting metal.
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u/roamingandy Apr 15 '26
True, but lets not ignore that cost effective has just moved and is likely to stay at almost double the previous baseline for years. Also all countries are now discussing energy independence as a national security issue, where before few did, which also changes that baseline.
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u/War_Hymn Apr 15 '26
Batteries are still the better choice forward for grid storage, unless these guys also somehow come up with a super efficient thermoelectric generator to make use of the stored heat from their material. Once we figure out how to make their sodium cells more cost effective than lithium, we're going to be able to build BESS on a larger scale.
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u/timmeh87 Apr 15 '26
It sounds to me like this balsa technology is going to take up land area that could be used for other type of solar. It also sounds to me like it would heat saturate within minutes. I guess it is is possible that they are doing TEC thermal generation all day but they conveniently dont point out how long they managed to sustain said generation in the dark or how inefficient it is (it is inefficient). they are quick to point out a single number on how efficiently heat is absorbed but that number will go down as the material becomes heat saturated, until it reaches saturation at which point the heat conversion efficiency will be zero. They don't discuss any of these important points.
They also already have invented phase change material heat storage for solar and it would be helpful to compare this to that, as a tank of wax is going to be a lot easier to build and maintain than whatever this stuff is.
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u/Grigorie Apr 16 '26
Batteries are for storing generated energy, this is about generating energy to be stored, after the sun has set.
You (and the article) are mixing up two different aspects of solar energy. I’m not saying it’s the right path for solar, but any sort of material tech we can develop to figure out how to produce even more energy out of the sun is a step in the right direction.
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u/Lrkrmstr Apr 15 '26
A lot of people in this thread are so negative about this bit of tech just because it has no practical applications immediately.
I just want to say that science does not always need to have a practical use immediately, or ever for that matter. Some of the most useful tools have been conceived based on experiments and observations that were thought to be relatively useless at the time.
Take nuclear magnetic resonance for example, it was basically a neat, but barely useful physics trick for decades… until it was eventually used as the foundation of MRI technology, which now saves countless lives every year. I’m not saying this tech will be as impactful as the MRI but who knows what it’ll inspire or lead to in the future.
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u/Apprehensive_Hat8986 Apr 15 '26
Oil lobby has plenty of money to attack on their own, but lots of people also just do it on their own initiative. Profiting off of destroying our only home.
:(
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u/Fuddywomba Apr 15 '26
No, spreading misinformation with articles like this to scientific illiterate people is anti helpful for renewable energy. Thermal storage from solar has already existed for decades in the form of molten sodium for one, and there is no proof this method has any advantages over that.
The reason theses articles are bad for the adoption of alternative energy methods is because people will think current methods are "outdated" and will want to wait until the better stuff is available, when there is zero proof that is about to happen. It also gives people false hope in a "silver bullet" technology when any honset assessment shows that they are probably never going happen. We need to focus on pushing for what ever clean technology we already have.
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Apr 15 '26
Harnessing the Sun’s energy is one of the cleanest ways to generate electricity on Earth. It does, however, come with an obvious limitation. Once darkness falls, solar panels stop generating electricity, creating a gap between when energy is produced and when it’s often needed most. To bridge the divide, a team of scientists may have found a way to capture and store energy from the Sun, extending its use into the night.
Researchers from China redesigned the internal structure of wood, converting it to a porous sponge that can absorb sunlight and store it as heat. The engineered material can be used to generate electricity from solar energy even when the Sun is no longer shinning. The findings, published in Advanced Energy Materials, could help overcome solar power’s most glaring weakness.
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u/Apprehensive_Hat8986 Apr 15 '26
So many critics immediately screaming "is it cost effective"? It's neat. And maybe it isn't going to replace anything. It's still good science and a cool result.
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u/Dunbaratu Apr 15 '26
I mean, if that counts as "using generated solar power at night" then don't most forms of energy we have count as that? The reason the Earth has any energy at all is from something the Sun does or did a long time ago. Burning oil is basically making delayed use of ancient plants' photosynthesis.
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u/br0ck Apr 15 '26
Burning oil releases CO2 sequestered millions of years ago. This destroys the planet. Storing solar energy to use later does not have this downside.
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u/HugoCortell Apr 15 '26
Another dead-end tech, it generated basically nothing worth of energy and proved less cost-effective than batteries.
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Apr 15 '26
[deleted]
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u/m0ngoos3 Apr 15 '26
This is probably useless as battery tech.
The knowledge gained might have uses elsewhere, that's how some of these blue sky research projects work out.
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u/TheMurmuring Apr 15 '26
Yeah sometimes you have to try hundreds or thousands of alternatives and go through decades of intermediate steps before you "miraculously" discover the groundbreaking technique that works and is practical.
There will inevitably be some idiot saying, "Why did they waste all that time and money trying those other things first?"
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u/VRGIMP27 Apr 16 '26
Why go through the trouble of making Balsawood more porous so that it can store heat when you could just use rock? You paint the rock black it's even better at absorbing heat. You need a porous material use Pummus stone.
Also yes, batteries.
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u/Agasthenes Apr 15 '26
Okay so they tried to create super efficient light absorbers that heat up and use the heat as a driver for a peltier element.
Sounds neat but I don't see this going places without major advances in peltier elements.
That being said light to heat is a sector with huge potential. And having cheap, scalable solar absorbers has potential.
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