Grid-scale batteries: They’re not just lithium

When size and weight don't matter, lots of other battery chemistries can work.

See full article...

 

[sitmonkey]

Thank you for this. We don't usually hear much about the non-Lithium Ion battery tech currently in use.

 

[afidel]

I think the next likely step will be sodium ion batteries in standard formats like 18650 or 21700. I say this because they reuse existing industrial equipment but have less expensive inputs so the time to ROI on scaling up their manufacturing will be shorter than custom solutions. The one thing that could upset this prediction is government intervention, if a major countries government were to throw money behind mass serial production of flow batteries for grid scale use then you might be able to get steep enough on the adoption curve for it to reach practical pricing, but so long as all that is funded is research and pilot programs you're never going to reach a $/kWh that will compete with the established tech.

 

[2drinksbehind]

Personally, I like the iron flow batteries that are being used for grid scale storage. Their primary ingredients are abundant (water, salt and iron), they have very long lifespans (25+ years) with near zero degradation, they're not explosive/flammable, and they have a very wide operating temperature range. The one thing they lack, energy density, is not really an issue for grid scale storage. I've never really seen a great critique on their shortcomings, but from what I've read they seem ideal.

 

[Pecisk]

Exactly. Outside fast charge / discharge territory, there is wastly different applications that make other materials pretty feasible.

 

[1Zach1]

Flow batteries seem to positioning themselves for long duration storage to supplement Lithium and other chemistries for overnight storage. It will fun to follow these and find out if they can really scale up and bring costs down to compete with lithium.

 

[mhalpern]

These chemistries are designed for seasonal use? Once every few months?

its not the chemistry, it's the fact that they are flow batteries rather than cell batteries, flow batteries move the electrolyte to a vessel where they won't discharge passively until pumped back across the electrodes

 

[DDopson]

These technologies are all very interesting, but what I don't see on any of them is numbers for $/MW and $/MWhr. I'd like to think that even in the research phase, there would be an eye towards the eventual at-scale cost targets.

 

[THT]

its not the chemistry, it's the fact that they are flow batteries rather than cell batteries, flow batteries move the electrolyte to a vessel where they won't discharge passively until pumped back across the electrodes

Same question. Are these batteries for seasonal use, occasional use, daily? Do they scale from residential to grid size?

It’s a question for me because it gives me a sense of how big the market is and what the economies of scale are.

 

[afidel]

Personally, I like the iron flow batteries that are being used for grid scale storage. Their primary ingredients are abundant (water, salt and iron), they have very long lifespans (25+ years) with near zero degradation, they're not explosive/flammable, and they have a very wide operating temperature range. The one thing they lack, energy density, is not really an issue for grid scale storage. I've never really seen a great critique on their shortcomings, but from what I've read they seem ideal.

~70% round trip efficiency in just the battery is their big drawback, until long duration storage is incentivized by regulators that's enough to keep them from being widely deployed.

 

[bold.lion3232]

Investor in Redflow here.

Redflow was placed in voluntary administration in Australia on August 23, 2024. (The US equivalent is probably chapter 11 bankruptcy?) https://redflow.com/asx-announcements

 

[GaggiX]

I'm waiting for a prismatic sodium cell with a decent voltage range, so it would be much cheaper to build your own DIY home battery. "A grade" LFP cells are around 80$/kwh right now from REPT, EVE and CATL, sodium ones should be even cheaper when production starts ramping up.

 

[mhalpern]

Same question. Are these batteries for seasonal use, occasional use, daily? Do they scale from residential to grid size?

It’s a question for me because it gives me a sense of how big the market is and what the economies of scale are.

The trade off with flow batteries is charge/discharge rate is significantly reduced compared to cell batteries, they tend to be big, though, because they need to have 2x the volume as their electrolyte takes up, just in electrolyte tanks, mostly seasonal grid, the advantage is that they can scale up almost at cubed square and the electrolyte can be cheap.

 

[adespoton]

The electrolyte liquid can be reused in other batteries. If it’s contaminated, it can be used by the oil and gas industry.

This is one of the liquids that's used in fracking, isn't it?

 

[Fatesrider]

There was a fire at a local industrial energy storage site last week which used lithium batteries that has the residents now all up in arms about having fires at industrial energy storage sites. I suspect the sentiment is more about "No fires in my back yard" than it is about the actual safety (or seeming lack thereof) behind industrial energy storage sites.

But if you have this as a selling point:

This battery cannot catch fire, and all of its parts are recyclable, Higgins told Ars. “You don’t have any of the toxic materials that you do in a lithium-ion battery.” The electrolyte liquid can be reused in other batteries. If it’s contaminated, it can be used by the oil and gas industry. If the battery leaks, the contents can be neutralized quickly and are subsequently not hazardous.

Then I suspect neighbors would be less intolerant of having them in their back yards. Hard to say, though, since that region of the county is heavily conservative, and they hate anything the liberals like. So it's not just NIMBY, but political NIMBY on top of it.

 

[yababom]

I wish this article has some facts and figures to put the 'advantages' in perspective--energy, cost, longevity, etc... We all know if they were competitive on all fronts, they would be already developed into products.

 

[adespoton]

There was a fire at a local industrial energy storage site last week which used lithium batteries that has the residents now all up in arms about having fires at industrial energy storage sites. I suspect the sentiment is more about "No fires in my back yard" than it is about the actual safety (or seeming lack thereof) behind industrial energy storage sites.

But if you have this as a selling point:

Then I suspect neighbors would be less intolerant of having them in their back yards. Hard to say, though, since that region of the county is heavily conservative, and they hate anything the liberals like. So it's not just NIMBY, but political NIMBY on top of it.

A lot of these industrial batteries are essentially shipping containers. So if you solve the fire issue, there's less of a NIMBY case than even the local electricity step-down plants; most of the installation doesn't even need to be above ground.

 

[1Zach1]

Same question. Are these batteries for seasonal use, occasional use, daily? Do they scale from residential to grid size?

It’s a question for me because it gives me a sense of how big the market is and what the economies of scale are.

It’s unlikely any battery will be used anything short of daily from a utility perspective. A battery that is just sitting there isn’t making money. I don’t believe flow batteries are well suited for residential applications, but there are other non-lithium chemistries that might eventually eat into the LFP market.

 

[Faustius23]

No mention of Form Energy's iron air batteries?

Their factory with a 500 megawatt production capacity is beginning production, and they just received a $150 million grant to scale up to 20 gigawatts of batteries per year by 2027.

https://formenergy.com/department-o...he-buildout-of-west-virginia-battery-factory/

 

[J.C. Helios]

“Demand… seems to be increasing every day,” said Giovanni Damato, president of CMBlu Energy. Media projections of growth in this space are huge. “We're really excited about the opportunity to… just be able to play in that space and provide as much capacity as possible.”

Was that supposed to be part of the quote? Because I think most writers would try to launder that kind of vague assertion through "Wall Street analysts," rather than "media."

 

[adespoton]

It’s unlikely any battery will be used anything short of daily from a utility perspective. A battery that is just sitting there isn’t making money. I don’t believe flow batteries are well suited for residential applications, but there are other non-lithium chemistries that might eventually eat into the LFP market.

To add to this, these batteries, from a utility perspective, would be used for peak shaving instead of LNG or coal plants. During low-use periods, they'd be charged up, and then during peaks, they'd smooth out the local supply curve. With the right designs, they could run for quite a long time with minimal maintenance, timeshifting the peak demand to hours when there's an oversupply instead.

 

[plectrum]

I think the next likely step will be sodium ion batteries in standard formats like 18650 or 21700. I say this because they reuse existing industrial equipment but have less expensive inputs so the time to ROI on scaling up their manufacturing will be shorter than custom solutions. The one thing that could upset this prediction is government intervention, if a major countries government were to throw money behind mass serial production of flow batteries for grid scale use then you might be able to get steep enough on the adoption curve for it to reach practical pricing, but so long as all that is funded is research and pilot programs you're never going to reach a $/kWh that will compete with the established tech.

Sodium ion 18650s are already available to purchase from China on AliExpress and similar.

The problem in comparison with lithium is they have more of a voltage dropoff, from 4V fully charged to 2V flat. That makes a number of applications where the cell voltage matters (eg power tools or lighting) awkward. If you are feeding them directly into an inverter or DC/DC converter then it's less of a problem.

 

[lurknomore]

~70% round trip efficiency in just the battery is their big drawback, until long duration storage is incentivized by regulators that's enough to keep them from being widely deployed.

The solution is to catch up with China, which will be installing 16x the solar panels the US will this year (330GW vs 20GW).
A decade at that rate and you have enough extra peak daytime energy that losing 30% instead of 10% stops mattering.

 

[forkspoon]

Was that supposed to be part of the quote? Because I think most writers would try to launder that kind of vague assertion through "Wall Street analysts," rather than "media."

You’re right of course. But are you calling it a feature or a bug to be more straightforward?

 

[J.C. Helios]

You’re right of course. But are you calling it a feature or a bug to be more straightforward?

If so, why stop there? Vibes-based projections of growth in this space are huge!

 

[mmiller7]

Thank you for this. We don't usually hear much about the non-Lithium Ion battery tech currently in use.

Indeed - too many people seem to forget there's other technology that has really good attributes.

One I've often seen come up is people wanting Lithium battery powered UPSs instead of "old obsolete lead acid" for home network gear, followed by complaining about the high cost and how many portable power stations that can be used as an EPS unit require manual cycling to keep the BMS in calibration since Lithium has such a flat discharge curve the calibration drifts if it doesn't hit the ends.

Except for something that will sit its entire life in a single place without moving, heavy lead batteries don't really matter, have a much better discharge curve for identifying SOC, don't really care about sitting at 100% for months or years on end, and are WAY cheaper.

 

[xWidget]

[...]

There is a case to be made for seasonal or occasional storage. Occasional meaning there are locales that have weeks long stretches where it is cloudy with little wind. Vehicle base batteries don’t hold charge for that long. So there could be a market for it.

[...]

Even then it's probably still cheaper to overbuild solar to 2.5x what you need on a good day, so that even the cloudy days cover 100% of demand.

[...]

Hydrogen or synthetic fuels can theoretically use existing infrastructure. Big cost advantage if so. If its fuel development process gets cheap, tough to beat imo.

Hydrogen can't use existing infrastructure - it needs (expensive) special containers. Synthetic fuels can't really get above 50% storage efficiency, so you're better off just going back to overbuilding solar and using regular batteries. (Edit: closer to 15% for the foreseeable future?)

 

[evan_s]

If it is daily grid use, these flow batteries have to get cheaper than batteries used for cars. There is a big economy of scale advantage that will be hard to beat. Vehicle based batteries still have a doubling in density with solid-state and other cheaper chemistries to ride. Their prices will go down.

There is a case to be made for seasonal or occasional storage. Occasional meaning there are locales that have weeks long stretches where it is cloudy with little wind. Vehicle base batteries don’t hold charge for that long. So there could be a market for it.

For this, they will be competing against green hydrogen or synthetic fuel du jour, HVDC transmission, vehicle based batteries, and plain old methane based fossil fuels. The window is closing pretty fast imo for flow based batteries.

Hydrogen or synthetic fuels can theoretically use existing infrastructure. Big cost advantage if so. If its fuel development process gets cheap, tough to beat imo.

If some technology is to be only used as a grid scale battery, how it gets cheap enough to outcompete vehicle-based batteries is an interesting question.

Yeah. The problem for seasonal or occasional use is anything that gets used that infrequently will result in really costly power because you've got to throw a lot of fixed costs and overhead on top of that relatively small amount of power generated once. You've got to pay for your leasing costs for the land for the entire year in that one bit of energy provided by the seasonal storage. I just don't see the math working on that.

There is some hope for flow batteries because their storage capacity is independent of the power output. Basically, higher capacity just needs bigger tanks to store the electrolytes so you could have a system where it can cycle daily using only 5 or 10% of the total capacity while reserving the rest of the capacity for more long term shifting. That said if the 5 or 10% is sized to do peak output for a couple hours during evening peak rates for the utility the full 100% would only be a couple days of power stored, at best.

 

[paulfdietz]

Hydrogen can't use existing infrastructure - it needs (expensive) special containers. Synthetic fuels can't really get above 50% storage efficiency, so you're better off just going back to overbuilding solar and using regular batteries.

This depends on the storage use case. For very long term storage with few charge/discharge cycles, the "cost of inefficiency" becomes unimportant compared to the capex of energy storage capacity. On that, hydrogen can be far superior to batteries.

There was an illuminating discussion of this recently in another thread.

https://meincmagazine.com/civis/threa...rst-half-of-2024.1502569/page-7#post-43119624

 

[Stuart Frasier]

No mention of Form Energy's iron air batteries?

Their factory with a 500 megawatt production capacity is beginning production, and they just received a $150 million grant to scale up to 20 gigawatts of batteries per year by 2027.

https://formenergy.com/department-o...he-buildout-of-west-virginia-battery-factory/

I was expecting to see them in the article too. It sounds like they are potentially very low cost (they project 10% of the cost of lithium-ion), but the long 100-hour duration is another way of saying they aren't power dense. But if they were genuinely cheap enough , you could turn solar installations into 24-hour dispatchable power sources. No duck curve, sell your power when it is most needed (and valuable). And they don't need scarce materials.

 

[raxadian]

Are some of these small enough to fit in a big truck? Because I wanna know how long an electrical cargo truck would last running hooked to one of these.

 

[_me]

I'm not an expert in this area... but what about just pumping a lot of seawater up a mountain, and then slowly releasing it through a turbine generator whenever you need more electricity? There's no loss of stored energy over time like with chemical batteries.

Side benefit: if you happen to have extra energy, you can use the water pressure to push that seawater through reverse-osmosis filters and get freshwater, which is scarce in certain parts of the country, like California.

Is anyone doing something like this already?

 

[real mikeb_60]

For those who can only conceive of batteries in vehicles, sodium-sulfur was tried. Ford worked on it, and ran a small test fleet of Transit Connect predecessors with NaS batteries. Yes, a few caught fire; the sulfur was corrosive, and when it leaked it burned at the 300F+ the batteries ran at. Ford gave up on NaS and moved to fuel cells and lead-acid (much later, Li-Ion) batteries. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Ecostar

 

[forkspoon]

If so, why stop there? Vibes-based projections of growth in this space are huge!

Well, one response has a basis in fact (not yours).

That’s my answer. Yours may be more vibe-y, or more based on misdirected, over the top cynicism. YMMV.

 

[C.M. Allen]

Thank you for this. We don't usually hear much about the non-Lithium Ion battery tech currently in use.

Partly because these other technologies, until rather recently, just didn't have the market size of lithium batteries, so that's where all the attention and investment was focused. And that has also greatly hampered adoption and scaling up production capacities. But the truth is, mass produced at the same scale as lithium batteries, these non-lithium alternatives have the potential to be an order of magnitude cheaper to produce (per mwh of storage) and can last for decades without any degradation. They're just heavy and bulky, which makes them useless for consumer electronics and transportation. But perfect for grid-scale storage, where the only factors that matters are cost, reliability, and longevity.

 

[afidel]

Indeed - too many people seem to forget there's other technology that has really good attributes.

One I've often seen come up is people wanting Lithium battery powered UPSs instead of "old obsolete lead acid" for home network gear, followed by complaining about the high cost and how many portable power stations that can be used as an EPS unit require manual cycling to keep the BMS in calibration since Lithium has such a flat discharge curve the calibration drifts if it doesn't hit the ends.

Except for something that will sit its entire life in a single place without moving, heavy lead batteries don't really matter, have a much better discharge curve for identifying SOC, don't really care about sitting at 100% for months or years on end, and are WAY cheaper.

They are NOT way cheaper, the cost of AGM batteries is actually now more than LFP and you can only use a bit over half of an AGMs capacity if you want to get a decent life out of them. As far as calibration, top balancing works just fine for LFP, actually better than bottom balancing, so there's no problem keeping them at 100% SoC.

 

[real mikeb_60]

I'm not an expert in this area... but what about just pumping a lot of seawater up a mountain, and then slowly releasing it through a turbine generator whenever you need more electricity? There's no loss of stored energy over time like with chemical batteries.

Side benefit: if you happen to have extra energy, you can use the water pressure to push that seawater through reverse-osmosis filters and get freshwater, which is scarce in certain parts of the country, like California.

Is anyone doing something like this already?

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean-Dead_Sea_Canal. That's a fairly straightforward hydroelectric scheme, not a battery, and not based on any kind of pumping. Once-through.

One could conceive of something similar between, say, the Gulf of California and the Salton Sea, but the difference in elevation is less and the collateral damage (loss of agriculture and other things - like the Coachella festival - in the region as Lake Coahuilla redevelops); and there's speculation that the southern San Andreas would come unstuck if the Lake reappeared providing water to lubricate the fault.

Pumping water up the hill then collecting power from it when it runs back down is standard pumped-hydro. It's a great setup if you have enough elevation difference over a short distance and plenty of water available. Both of those are limiting factors.