Scientists continue to explore advanced battery technologies that could help us unlock the full potential of renewable energy, working to address the intermittent nature of power coming from the sun and wind. A team at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has come up with a new design that ticks a few important boxes in this area, demonstrating a type of "hibernating" battery that can preserve its energy for months at a time.

The type of energy storage technology at the center of this research is known as a molten-salt battery. These have been around for more than 50 years in various forms, and are fancied as a grid-scale storage solution for renewable energy due to their low cost and use of commonly available materials.

These devices use molten salt as the electrolyte, which is the solution that carries the electrical charge between a battery's two electrodes, the cathode and the anode. Keeping the electrolyte at high temperature keeps the salt in a molten state and sees it flow like a liquid, but at room temperature it becomes solid. The PNNL team has leveraged these attributes to produce what's described as a temperature-based hibernating battery.