Skill and Scale up: Voltage applied

During the Age of Enlightenment, many people experimented with electricity, with varying degrees of success. Often, the experiments were only convincing for entertainment purposes at fairs. In 1780, the Italian physician Luigi Galvani attracted much more attention: Using two connected pieces of iron and copper, he made the muscles in the legs of a frog twitch when they came into contact with the animal. Spectacular - that's how the scientific world saw it and concluded that it was "animal electricity". But from Volta's point of view, he was completely wrong. Rather, Galvani was generating electricity electrochemically using two different metals. 

The first battery is invented

When Alessandro Volta learned of the frog leg experiments in 1791, he conducted his own experiments and discovered that the salt water in the animal's body created a current between the two metals. Thus, electricity is generated by the contact of certain metals. Based on these findings, he constructed the "Volta column": He placed pieces of leather soaked in salt water between copper and zinc plates, which were stacked closely together to form a column. Chemical reactions turn the copper into the negative pole and the zinc into the positive pole. When the two ends are connected, electricity flows. While the individual cells have relatively small voltages, when stacked in a column, they add up to a high total voltage. With the "Volta column," Alessandro Volta built the world's first battery and opened the door to the age of electricity. The discovery of a permanent source of electricity made the study of electricity possible.

The gateway to the age of electricity

Until then, electricity was only visible to humans during thunderstorms - in the form of lightning. Since then, the field of research has undergone a rapid evolution, marked by many groundbreaking discoveries. John B. Goodenough, M. Stanley Whittingham, and Akira Yoshino have been particularly instrumental. They are known as the "fathers of the lithium-ion battery" and their research in the 1970s and 1980s sparked a technological revolution. Since then, the basic characteristics of the lithium-ion battery have changed very little. There have been incremental improvements in materials and cell design. However, it is also difficult to optimize the LIB, as electrochemical stability and high safety concerns set natural limits.

Variety of energy storage systems

Modern energy storage systems are essential for relieving pressure on the electricity grid and for electrifying industry and transportation. They are based on four fundamentally different approaches:

• Electrochemical energy storage, such as a lithium-ion battery or a lead-acid battery.
• Chemical energy storage, such as converting electricity to hydrogen, storing it, and then converting it back to electricity.
• Mechanical energy storage, such as pumped hydro. Here, water is pumped from a lower reservoir to a higher reservoir and released only when needed to generate electricity via a turbine.
• Thermal energy storage, such as metal-based high-temperature energy storage, allows process heat to be stored at high temperatures for later use.