Thermal decomposition battery commercialized by 2050
13
144
470
2051
34%
chance

Uniform heat (perhaps from a solar concentrator) causes an endothermic chemical reaction. Later, when temperatures are colder, you run the same reaction in reverse to generate electricity. Resolves YES if there is a commercialized battery powered this way by 2050. Molten salt energy storage doesn't count because 1. there's no chemical reaction, just a phase change, and 2. It's not a self contained mass produced unit like a battery.

This would not violate thermodynamics because just like a regular heat engine it is moving heat from a hotter source to a colder sink. There's just some additional time-delay between the two. To the best of my knowledge there is no battery based on this principle yet but it is totally possible. This is the only valid way I can think of to extract work from uniform heat - even though the heat is uniform in space in the system at one point in time, it is not uniform across time and that enables work to be done by the heat.

This tech if it got cheap enough would be extremely useful for the base load of a power grid that is heavily dependent on solar.

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the technical term for this type of system is "thermochemical energy storage (TCES)" and there are already multiple companies that are working to commercialize TCES systems. Here is one: https://redoxblox.com/

bought Ṁ10 YES

@pyrylium i actually think you could argue this already resolves YES depending on what you mean by "self-contained mass-produced unit"

@pyrylium device must be fully automated, assembled in a factory, and have unit sales >1000

@JonathanRay I don't think redoxblox is there yet but solid chance they're there within a year. 38% chance for anyone to commercialize by 2050? no-brainer

bought Ṁ5 of YES

Betting yes at 33% to incent myself to do my homework on prototyping this

bought Ṁ10 of YES

@JonathanRay I'm always up for betting YES on a self-incentivized market

bought Ṁ50 of NO

@JonathanRay betting no at 38% to incentivize you to bet yes and prototype this

bought Ṁ10 of NO

@JonathanRay

NO for the same reason--do it!

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