The Blue Battery, for a sustainable and independent world | Mei Nelissen | TEDxUtrecht

the discovery of fire must have been incredible it cost changes in the way our ancestors processed our food expanded their habitats and was essential for industrial progressions approximately 1.6 million years later the internet was invented the way we communicate our infrastructure and economy rely on the Internet and just one year ago we have made an invention that could forever change the way we deal with our desire for energy this box is the next thing in line of a series of great inventions that changes the world imagine a bomb being dropped on one of our power stations just think about the consequences hundreds of thousands of people even entire cities depend on the energy generated by just one power station if that stops working we would offer problem phones would stop working our electrical devices trains we completely depend on these power stations which might be the most vulnerable link in our society but why do we let this happen the big world problems have always been a challenge to me when I was very young I was fascinated by the power of lightning so I figured what if we can catch this lightning and use it as electricity so I designed an installation in which the power of lightning was converted to steam which you could then use and I was extremely excited about it until the point I found out that the actual amount of energy you can generate out of electricity out of lightning is just enough to light one room so speaking of anticlimax besides the fact that our energy system is so extremely vulnerable we have got not a big problem and you've all probably heard fit but we are dramatically running out of fossil sources if we keep using oil and gas we are doing it right now our oil deposits will be gone by the year 2002 and all of our gas deposits will be empty by the Year 2060 oil and gas are crucial for the production of plastics and food but we mostly use them to generate electricity and that's why we have to come up with new methods to generate sustainable energy and a lot of inventions have been made already like solar panels and windmills Sun and wind are completely free great problem solved you'd say but that is not really true since the demand of energy doesn't always match a generation of it which means that at some moments for example during a storm more energy is generated than needed and therefore wasted while at other moments more energy is needed than generated and we completely depend on our non sustainable methods to generate electricity again so what we need is a method that provides us with energy whenever we need it we need a battery a sustainable battery and that's exactly what we've invented three girls Alena acaba multiple nerve Alda and me and in our final year of high school just one and a half year ago we contacted a company called wet sis and came in touch with Michel Jacques who has guided us during our projects the battery we had in mind had to be built first before this could be tested and the battery we built is still the only battery of this type that has ever been built the process of the building of the battery started with the stacking of membranes and now it's getting a little technical a membrane is a thin barrier between two solutions which lets through certain molecules and ions the stacking process has to be done in a very specific order if we would have made one single mistake during this process the entire battery wouldn't have been able to work after the stacking process the battery looked like this and this is called the stack the stack is the motor behind the entire system the stack together with the liquids and pumps allow us to generate and store as much electrical energy as we want when the battery is taken in mass production these separate parts are put together inside this box and it's now called the blue battery the reason it's called blue is because of the fact that the entire system runs on four solutions these solutions can be made out of pure water sodium chloride and sodium sulfate which means they don't deplete any natural resources because these substances can be found everywhere on our planet namely in our sea I can talk for hours about how the battery exactly works and I'd love to but I won't but what's most important to know about it is the fact that the driving force behind the battery is one of the most common substances we've gone our planet water h2o the common this reaction occurs in the blue battery when energy is generated and stored to store electrical energy water is split into hydrogen and hydroxide ions and to generate the electricity and these two ions form water as I explained the blue battery consists of membranes which was a tooth and a thin barrier between two solutions which lets through certain molecules and ions one of the membrane types used within the blue battery is called a bipolar membrane and that's a membrane type in which two membranes are stuck together as one membrane here the bipolar membrane can be seen as the two blocks when I want to store electrical energy water flows into the bipolar membrane and split in hydrogen and hydroxide ions creating a concentrated acid and a concentrated base at this moment I have converted my electrical energy into chemical energy and this is exactly the type of energy I can store for as long as I want now when I want to generate the electricity and I can simply take these solutions I just created and put them into the exact same battery now the opposite will occur hydrogen and hydroxyl ions will flow into the bipolar membrane form water which will be transported out of it to generate and store electrical energy the same battery and the same liquids can be used over and over again the batteries we have nowadays contain substances like lithium which makes them almost impossible to recycle with the blue battery this won't be a problem when I don't want to use my battery anymore I can simply take my deluded solutions gently mix them and just pour it back into the sea it won't harm nature the blue battery allows us to generate and store as much electrical energy as we want it's completely recyclable and it doesn't deplete any natural resources because the substances can be found in our sea when looked at Alina and I discovered the blue battery was actually working we were dancing like we had discovered fire so what's most important to think is about the role the blue battery could play in our society the size of it can be adapted to the customer's needs depending on the amount of energy you want to be able to generate or store with it I have brought this specific box because this is the actual size the blue battery would have to provide one average household with energy for one complete day just one cubic meter anyone easily fit one cubic meter somewhere in their house and since electricity plays such a crucial part in our daily life we should keep these things that are so important to us as ourselves as possible now imagine a world where sustainable energy is even more sustainable because we don't have to waste any more the world where energy can be generated locally and stored in homes of people a world that doesn't depend on our decreasing fossil sources and the big companies that rule them this box the blue battery is the key to an independent and sustainable world thank you very much

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 169,410

Rating: 4.6593409 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Netherlands, Science (hard), Alternative energy, Biology, Biotech, Deextinction, Engineering, Entrepreneurship, Environment, Evolution, Global issues, Health, Mission Blue, Oceans, Oil, Pollution, Social Entrepreneurship, Sustainability, Urban Planning, Water

Id: ULtGWCalIYg

Length: 9min 45sec (585 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 10 2016