Turning Car Batteries Into Solar Cells

How’s this for reincarnation? Scientists can take old batteries out of decrepit gas-guzzlers and transform them into a solar panel powerhouses.

It’s a “classic win-win solution,” explained MIT researchers in a recent paper for Energy and Environmental Science, which found that new perovskite-based photovoltaic solar cells can recycle poisonous lead from increasingly obsolete acid-based car batteries to create cleantech for everyone. Without sacrificing much in efficiency: MIT professors Angela M. Belcher and Paula T. Hammond and their graduate students achieved power conversion of 19 percent, which is competitive in today’s marketplace.

Their research and development, which leapt from scientific demonstration to benchmark efficiency in two short years, found that a thin film of perovskite tech derived from a single car battery could produce enough panels to empower 30 households. MIT’s promising recycling could provide solar power manufacturing with an innovative leap forward, transforming the 20th-century’s toxic leftovers into 21st-century must-haves.

Speaking of toxic, lead will be fully encapsulated by other materials in the final panel, the production of which is a comparatively “benign” affair with “the advantage of being a low-temperature process,” explained Belcher in a statement. “Once the battery technology evolves, over 200 million lead-acid batteries will potentially be retired in the United States, and that could cause a lot of environmental issues,” Belcher said.

“It is important that we consider the life cycles of the materials in large-scale energy systems,” Hammond added. “And here we believe the sheer simplicity of the approach bodes well for its commercial implementation.”

The good news come with some caveats. The study was supported by Italian oil and gas multinational Eni, which has had more than its share of hydrocarbon controversies. In addition, scaling perovskite panel production upward could provoke manufacturers to look for new sources of lead rather than recycle discarded material. That’s an aging extraction process that comes with a host of problems, especially for a global village looking to dramatically decrease its carbon footprint.

But as an experiment in taking something old and toxic and turning it into something new and clean, MIT’s breakthrough could prove useful. “I think the work demonstrated here … can resolve a major issue of industrial waste, and provide a solution for future renewable energy,” UCLA’s unaffiliated engineering professor Yang Yang testified in MIT’s press release. Let’s hope he’s right.

This article appeared at Solar Energy