ENERGY SPRING

Technologies for harvesting renewable energy have been developed and applied for decades. Nonetheless, despite leaps throughout the spectrum of renewable energy, no matter the method that is deployed to harvest energy, the Achilles heel is managing the cache and exchange of the produced electricity. A surprising yet simple solution arrives from across the equation of the of the water energy nexus.

A new, emerging technology, Capacitive Deionization (CDI), can simultaneously store energy and desalinate water, and thus can serve as the technological foundation for our evolving energy and water needs. In CDI, we perform water desalination by charging a cell using an applied voltage of about 1 Volt. As CDI is classified as an electrochemical system, similar to a battery, CDI cells can store energy while they are being charged.

The energy can be recovered at the end of the process, similar to utilizing energy from a discharging of a battery. Further, due to its unique, low voltage input requirements, CDI can be easily integrated with renewable energy sources, such as solar panels and wind turbines.

These features of a CDI system are maximized in the proposed infrastructure. In this design, CDI cells are designed as column-based springs. The columns contain integrated wind turbines and solar panels to power the water desalination process. Furthermore, the columns store up to 80% of the energy used in the desalination process, which can be recovered at the end of the process for clean renewable energy.