Using quantum principles for 10x performance increases in key energy technologies

The acceleration of energy transfer and conversion processes based on quantum superposition states is bound to radically change solar, battery, and nuclear technologies.

If you’re like me, you may have found the lack of radical innovation in energy technologies frustrating -- but that situation may finally change in the not-so-distant-future. There is a clear roadmap now for performance increases of 10x and more across key energy technologies such as solar, batteries, and nuclear. 

Innovation in the energy field has become highly incremental and plagued by physical limits. As an example for such limits, charging rates of batteries are capped by the maximum rate at which ions can move from one battery electrode to another. Limits like these can be overcome if one changes the physical principles that underlie the respective technology. But most energy technologies -- from generation to storage and transmission -- have not seen changes in their underlying physics for decades. 

This could now change as more and more researchers consider particular quantum principles like superposition not just for information processing (think quantum computing) but also for energy applications. My colleagues and I consider this trend to represent the emergence of “quantum energy science” -- as a counterpart to the well-established “quantum information science.”   

What kind of applications are we looking at here? Take the case of organic solar cells. These are essentially plastic films, feeling and looking not so different from a roll of tape. Both their cost and their robustness is much below that of the widely used silicon solar cells. So why have we not seen more organic solar cells in use then? Frankly, because to date their advantages have been offset by their low efficiency. Typically less than 10% of incoming light is turned into electricity. Their silicon-based competitors can achieve more than two or three times that value. 

This is where the deployment of quantum principles comes into play. The efficiency of organic solar cells can be driven up by moving absorbed energy across the cell quickly. The fastest way to do this is by using superposition states where energy is collectively held across a considerable area. But making good use of superposition states requires particular nanostructures. Researchers are now designing such nanostructures based on their simulations of those quantum effects playing out across them. By making organic solar cells competitive with silicon solar cells unlocks their advantages such as >30x reduction in weight. 

A more radical change can be seen in the form of quantum batteries -- another example of changing the physical principles that underlie an application. Most small scale energy storage today relies on electrochemical batteries. In those batteries energy is charged and discharged by moving charged particles (“ions”) from one electrode to another. Because it takes a certain minimum time for those charged particles to move, there's a hard upper limit for how fast such devices can be charged and discharged. 

But electrochemistry doesn't have a monopoly on small-scale energy storage. A quantum battery -- such as the one demonstrated by my colleague James Quach -- doesn't involve ion migration. Rather, energy is stored by quantum mechanically shifting a large number of molecules to a higher energetic state. This battery thus involves no moving parts in the traditional sense -- and charging can occur much faster. What’s even better, the process of quantum mechanically shifting molecules to a high state accelerates in proportion to the number of molecules involved. Therefore, the bigger the battery the faster the charging process. Even early prototypes of such quantum batteries exhibit power densities >10x larger than what is considered theoretically possible with electrochemical batteries. 

But the best is yet to come: what if I told you that these quantum mechanical principles that accelerate energy transfer and conversion processes can also be exploited at the nuclear scale? This implies the possibility of faster nuclear decay and faster nuclear reactions. 

More about this in a future post. If you can’t wait, have a peak at our academic paper on quantum energy science.