alt.hn

5/17/2026 at 6:42:35 PM

Scientists “bottle the sun” with a liquid battery that stores solar energy

 https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/05/260513221821.htm

by ndr42

5/17/2026 at 7:33:07 PM

Not clear from the very fluffy press release how one gets this pyrimidone to start releasing enough energy to boil water while it maintains 60% better energy density than lithium ion batteries.

I’d personally want to understand that before making any big plans, but this sounds cool.

by vessenes

5/17/2026 at 7:39:17 PM

Yeah, you'd think they'd include that.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aec6413

"Upon treatment with acid, that bond breaks to release more than a megajoule per kilogram of the compound, enough to rapidly boil water from a solution."

That's from the editor's summary (I haven't had time to read the paper).

by flopsamjetsam

5/17/2026 at 7:43:00 PM

From the article:

> When exposed to a trigger -- such as a small amount of heat or a catalyst -- the molecule snaps back into its original form, releasing the stored energy as heat.

From the paper abstract, the catalyst is HCl. I don't have access to the full paper, so I don't know how they separate the HCl from the MOST to neutralize it to be rechargeable again.

by kenhwang

5/17/2026 at 9:11:37 PM

"A small amount of heat or a catalyst". Well, that sounds unstable. So any random contamination and you have a runaway reaction.

by kadoban

5/17/2026 at 9:26:23 PM

From what I've seen of the paper, it seems like the catalyst is needed for a full energy release reaction. Regular batteries also have rapid energy release with unintended contamination of a chemical (water), and we still generally have no problems during regular usage.

The reaction triggered by heat doesn't release all the stored energy, which would be the bigger concern for unintended runaway reactions.

by kenhwang

5/17/2026 at 9:32:15 PM

A small amount of heat is a lot harder to isolate from than water though.

by ludston

5/17/2026 at 11:27:59 PM

As a sibling comment says, in the paper the catalyst is acid and I can't find the release using heat in the paper. Is that an hallucination in the press article?

(Note: At high enough temperature the thermal energy will be high enough to go over the energy wall from the high energy isometric to the normal one. So it's plausible. But with high enough temperatures a lot of nasty things can happen, like total decomposition or just burning. So it may not be a good strategy to make a rechargable baterry.)

by gus_massa

5/17/2026 at 8:54:47 PM

Trees also store the sun, and can release it back as heat.

Blackberries store the sun too, and later release it as wine or jam :)

by CrzyLngPwd

5/17/2026 at 10:13:05 PM

Blackberry crumble, with clotted cream or custard.

by gerdesj

5/17/2026 at 10:18:48 PM

They can release it as glucose and oxygen actually, slightly better than just heat.

by shiandow

5/17/2026 at 7:27:04 PM

It sure would be nice to see some way to harness all this energy falling around us. I'd far prefer to just catch a few rays to charge my toys than plug into some far distant machine.

I remember thinking, in my youth, that the technology that enabled CASIO calculation would one day be applied as well to a bigger Turing machine, but I'm yet to see a solar-powered computer.

I sure wish it'd happen, though. All these magic solar energy storage/conversion systems need to start showing up on SOM/SOC's, imho ..

by rigonkulous

5/17/2026 at 10:10:22 PM

I have a consumer motion-triggered camera that is armed 24/7 and records for 30 seconds after each trigger. It has WiFi and serves playback itself, as well as of course video encoding. It's probably running Linux though i haven't verified.

It runs off a 25cm square solar panel screwed to a wall that only receives direct illumination for 5 hours a day, and is not in any way optimised beyond 'that looks roughly like it's pointing at the sun'.

Works great!

by akdor1154

5/17/2026 at 9:37:26 PM

I have solar panels at my house. My laptop, phone, and iPad are solar powered (on most days).

by smt88

5/17/2026 at 7:48:11 PM

you still need too much surface area and too much storage to generate the amount of power needed

absent of a major breakthrough solar will always be a house/grid level technology, which is fine and works at scale

by micromacrofoot

5/17/2026 at 8:06:37 PM

Sure, so a solar-only laptop is not practical, but generating the power in its battery on your roof is a solved problem.

This MOST process doesn't immediately look like it has home-scale applications (maybe in cold climates), but for heat to make steam, promising.

by blacksmith_tb

5/17/2026 at 8:31:42 PM

I wonder how far you could get if you were really trying. E.g. raspberry pi, eink, etc.

by bawolff

5/17/2026 at 10:44:15 PM

Yeah, I suspect we're mostly quite wasteful of energy.

by gavmor

5/17/2026 at 8:01:40 PM

I think I saw an apple A16 takes about 8 watts, which would be about a square foot of solar panel. So assuming we keep making progress it doesn’t seem insane to me that a laptop where the back of the lcd is a solar panel would be enough?

by nickpeterson

5/17/2026 at 8:11:34 PM

Angle though isn't ideal, unless the PV panel pops off the lid so you can position it better (and still be able to open the screen far enough back to read - though that's often not great in bright sun). I remember the OLPC could be run by hoisting a bucket of sand or water up on a rope and pulley on a tree branch and letting it drive a small generator as that came back down - and that was almost 20yr ago).

by blacksmith_tb

5/17/2026 at 8:20:30 PM

the mild inconvenience of needing to be in direct sun for N hours always overshadows this

you need a massive efficiency improvement to overcome this

we're still in the calculators and tv remotes level of on-device solar

by micromacrofoot

5/17/2026 at 8:29:14 PM

[dead]

by Rekindle8090

5/17/2026 at 8:11:00 PM

[dead]

by vitally3643

5/17/2026 at 8:42:23 PM

Stores it for return as heat. Which is useful, but not nearly as useful as returning it as electricity would be.

Still, if it could be stored stably in the summer and converted to heat in the winter then possibly helpful.

I wonder how the efficiencies compare to producing hydrogen or other burnable gases.

by AndrewDucker

5/17/2026 at 8:58:29 PM

Something like 25% of global energy is dedicated to industrial heating. While not as immediately applicable as electricity, there are many uses for load shifting solar as heat.

That being said, there are some "hot rocks" companies who have been working with thermoptovoltaic cells. Which could still work, but the low hanging fruit is in the millions of direct uses for heat.

by 3eb7988a1663

5/17/2026 at 8:55:27 PM

> Still, if it could be stored stably in the summer and converted to heat in the winter then possibly helpful.

There are already sand batteries that store heat well and are used in northern climates: https://polarnightenergy.com/news/worlds-largest-sand-batter...

by hn_throwaway_99

5/17/2026 at 9:19:15 PM

These are too expensive for seasonal storage.

by pfdietz

5/17/2026 at 9:17:43 PM

> Still, if it could be stored stably in the summer and converted to heat in the winter then possibly helpful.

The capex per unit of stored energy in undoubtedly far too high for that to be worthwhile. Seasonal energy storage requires extremely low cost storage media.

by pfdietz

5/18/2026 at 12:49:02 AM

Good news in trying times good work researchers at UC Santa Barbara education and hard work still pay off there is hope I was starting to wonder…

by Danox

5/17/2026 at 7:10:10 PM

This sounds like an explosive breakthrough.

by euroderf

5/17/2026 at 7:31:13 PM

"When exposed to a trigger -- such as a small amount of heat or a catalyst -- the molecule snaps back into its original form, releasing the stored energy as heat."

That's a bit concerning. Runaway waiting to happen.

by ____tom____

5/17/2026 at 7:28:41 PM

bang.

there are a huge number of things that can store energy, chemicaly ,and reversibly, but the gotchas are always lurking, exotic wildly expensive ingedients, dangerous failure modes , or very complicated operational requirements that will not scale into the real world. this anouncent makes clear that is is based on dna, which is no surprise as nature is the ancient master of chemical energy storage,and which all of us useing right now anyway

by metalman

5/18/2026 at 12:46:09 AM

the charging is supposed to happen in plain sunlight in "UV collectors", or is renewable energy envisioned to power UV lamps / LEDs?

by DoctorOetker