A civil engineering alumnus of Purdue University, Bashir Abubakar Audu has spent the past four years as an assistant project manager with The Walsh Group. Bashir Audu previously worked as a project-controls engineer with IEA Renewable Energy and maintains an interest in sustainability.
Building upon the concept of Tesla's Powerwall, which efficiently stores energy generated from solar panels atop residential properties for future use, a team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is working on expanding the capacity of the technology to store enough energy to power small cities. One of the mainstream potential methods for large-scale renewable energy storage is lithium-ion batteries, but the MIT team's solution is to use giant tanks of white-hot molten silicon to store excess electricity generated by wind and solar farms, which can then be converted into electricity when necessary.
Not only do the researchers believe it would be more cost-effective than lithium-ion batteries; they also estimate it would cost roughly half as much as hydroelectric storage, which is considered the cheapest form of effective grid-scale energy storage.
