The group's novel sodium-sulfur battery design offers a fourfold increase on energy capacity compared to a typical lithium-ion battery, and shapes as a promising technology for future grid-scale energy storage.

The team's creation falls into a category of batteries known as molten-salt batteries, which have been around in various forms for around 50 years. As the emphasis on renewable energy continues to grow, scientists are bullish on the potential of molten-salt batteries to store it, owing to their relative affordability and reliance on commonly available materials.

This could, theoretically, see them built on the larger scales needed to store vast amounts of renewable energy. Typical versions of these rely on a sodium-sulfur chemistry and hold their electrodes at high temperatures to keep the electrolyte in a liquid molten state. Scientists in China and Australia have teamed up to develop their own version, which they say offers greatly improved performance at room temperature instead.