• Question: Does your work damage the environment or help it ?

    Asked by anon-240303 to Emily on 9 Mar 2020.
    • Photo: Emily Goddard

      Emily Goddard answered on 9 Mar 2020:

      Help I hope! My work should help make heating your home with solar panels more effective, and, because you can store spare solar energy and use it later when the sun isn’t shining, you don’t need to use fossil fuel energy then.

      There’s always a trade-off though — I use two materials, one is a byproduct of another chemical process, which is very green, but the other one is dug out of lake beds which isn’t so good. But… the batteries made with them should last for 50+ years, so hopefully the energy saving they do over that time balances out the start of their life.

Comments

  • Photo: Emily

    Emily commented on :

    P.S. I’m sorry I can’t be more specific, but my work is commercially sensitive because Sunamp (who pay for my PhD) would like to be able to patent and sell it, so I have to keep some details secret!