Solar Storage: The Key To Better Solar Power May Be A Plant

One of the largest obstacles facing the solar industry is the issue of storage. Batteries aren’t quite reliable or sophisticated enough to help tide solar users over for longer periods of time, like a winter season when there’s less sun.

But by taking a page out of nature’s book, researchers at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, may have found the best way to tackle the storage problem, according to research published in Scientific Reports.

The design for a new graphene prototype developed at RMIT was inspired by the western sword fern. The plant has a series of veins running through it to help transport water and store energy, Professor Min Gu says in a release from the University.

The researchers integrated the “fractal” design the plant relies on for life into the designs for the new electrode that, when combined with supercapacitors, increased storage capacity by 30 times current storage capacities.

The prototype is thin and flexible, features solar cells currently don’t have. Because the new prototype is flexible it offers endless opportunity for integration and use with existing solar technologies. It could potentially be places on windows, car exteriors, cell phones or anything else that runs on battery power because it solves the storage problem without hampering the collection, or energy producing features of the solar cells that produce power.