Back-to-the-future battery spells good news for energy

Scientists have given a 21st-century makeover to the nickel-iron battery, a gadget conceived by Thomas Edison during the era of the steam engine and horse and buggy.
The upgraded battery can be recharged in around two and half minutes, as opposed to several hours at present, and discharges in under 30 seconds. Because it can store and release energy so quickly, the battery could be a boon for the renewable-energy industry and also help power cars as Edison originally envisaged, the researchers say.
Devised by Edison and fellow inventor Waldemar Jungner in 1902, the nickel-iron battery comprises two electrodes, one made of nickel and the other of iron, that are immersed in an alkaline solution.
Its advantage is that materials are abundant and cheap and the solution is relatively harmless compared to toxic lead-acid batteries.
Nickel-iron batteries were marketed for cars until the 1920s, but then dropped out of the picture because they were not as powerful as petrol and diesel fuel engines.
Another downside was that they took a long time to recharge. They remained a robust backup power source for railways, mines and other industries before falling out of favor in the mid-1970s. Today, just a handful of companies make the batteries, mainly to store surplus electricity from solar and wind generators and release it during times of peak demand. The new-generation battery comes courtesy of a team led by Hongjie Dai, a chemistry professor at Stanford University in California.