Energy storage technology an innovation winner

Australian Research Council Future Fellow and an Associate Professor at the Australian National University, Yun Liu is the 2013 Banksia Sustainability Awards winner in the Innovation category. She has been instrumental in the research into a new material which could hold our energy hopes.

The material can store large amounts of energy with very little energy loss and has practical applications in renewable energy storage, electric cars and defence and space technologies. It could be particularly transformative for wind and solar power, which can cause problems when fed into the power grid at low demand times.

Yun Liu says she is eager to discover novel functional materials to solve the bottleneck problems in ‘high-tech’ and renewable energy areas. In the past, the search for materials with colossal permittivity for use in capacitors has been met with limited success, severely limiting the further miniaturisation of electronic/electric systems and uses as energy storage devices. The invented material is capable of storing a lot of energy with negligible energy loss and excellent temperature stability to deal with normal daily temperature fluctuations.

The judges found this technology to be an outstanding innovative approach to a highly technical and important problem. The long-term and far-reaching potential in energy management systems is outstanding.