Supercapacitor cement could supercharge renewable energy storage

Incorporating nanoparticles of carbon black into wet cement can transform it into a supercapacitor electrode once the cement has cured, US researchers have shown. The team says that the material could be used to store renewable energy and find more exotic applications such as roads that can wirelessly charge electric vehicles.

Production of cement and concrete is today responsible for approximately 8% of global carbon dioxide emissions. Several ideas to reduce this by using alternative cement formulations, for example, have yet to achieve widespread success. Meanwhile, rising investment in intermittent renewable energy sources has led to rising demand for storage technologies. ‘Batteries are based on rare materials that are not available to everyone, so it’s not scalable,’ says Franz-Josef Ulm of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Ulm and colleagues devised a bipartite solution by adding new functionality to concrete, allowing it to be used as a ‘structural capacitor’.