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Storage stuff

88V8
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Re: Storage stuff

#428114

Postby 88V8 » July 16th, 2021, 2:48 pm

100MW of battery storage goes live... Britain's electricity grid is now balancing supply and demand with the help of a giant battery in Wiltshire funded by Chinese investment. The 100MW system has been developed by UK company Penso Power with funding from China's state-owned Huaneng Group utility and CNIC Corporation. Shell has an offtake deal to trade all of the power from the battery, which is now fully operational. - Telegraph

Penso Power https://www.pensopower.com/

and a bit more about the project https://www.rechargenews.com/transition ... 2-1-782383.
Investment from China, batteries from Samsung and Contemporary Amperex Technology Co (China).

UK manufacturers, where art thou?
UK Sovereign Wealth Fund, where art thou?

V8

murraypaul
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Re: Storage stuff

#428771

Postby murraypaul » July 19th, 2021, 1:01 pm

Demand right now is 36.75 GW. 100MW seems like a drop in the ocean as far as balancing demand?

Edit: Figures for yesterday (lower as a weekend): minimum: 19.207 GW maximum: 31.886 GW average: 26.359 GW

88V8
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Re: Storage stuff

#428810

Postby 88V8 » July 19th, 2021, 3:18 pm

murraypaul wrote:Demand right now is 36.75 GW. 100MW seems like a drop in the ocean as far as balancing demand?
Edit: Figures for yesterday (lower as a weekend): minimum: 19.207 GW maximum: 31.886 GW average: 26.359 GW

Yes, it's a very small start, a teaspoon to bale out a lake. And is it really 'balancing' when they have a guaranteed customer via an offtake agreement, in this case Shell.
Still, one has to start somewhere.

Some observations on offtake agreements and their part in the initial project financing here

https://s2solar.com/introduction-to-sta ... tructures/

V8

Hallucigenia
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Re: Storage stuff

#429321

Postby Hallucigenia » July 21st, 2021, 2:39 pm

dspp wrote:Are there any good public reports that break all the various material supply chains down neatly ? My hunch is that the nickel and the cobalt ones will be more of an issue than the lithium one, but I am open to correction on that.


Wotcha all, long time no post.

@sdmoores of @benchmarkmin is your man to follow for the lithium market in particular, although they look at other inputs too. See eg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxG_vOp-7po

They're forecasting 225 megafactories by 2030 with capacity of 4.1TWh cells. "Lithium supply is growing at less half the rate of demand"

They claim currently 440kt of lithium supply versus 432kt of demand
By 2030, they forecast 1.5mt supply versus 2.4mt demand.

Similar with cobalt, roughly balanced now, 274kt supply in 2030 versus 476kt demand.

Image

Current prices since 2016 : https://www.benchmarkminerals.com/lithium-prices/
10-year price curve for carbonate :
Image
Image
Sees nickel cathodes predominating out to 2030 :
Image
key :
LCO – Lithium Cobalt Oxide (LiCoO2)
NCA – Lithium Nickel Cobalt Aluminium Oxide (LiNiCoAlO2)
NCM (NMC) – Lithium Nickel Cobalt Manganese Oxide (LiNiCoMnO2)
LMO – Lithium Manganese Oxide (LiMn2O4)
LNMO – Lithium Nickel Manganese Spinel (LiNi0.5Mn1.5O4)
LFP – Lithium Iron Phosphate (LiFePO4/C)

scotia
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Re: Storage stuff

#429474

Postby scotia » July 22nd, 2021, 12:22 am

88V8 wrote:100MW of battery storage goes live...

The maximum power output is 100MW, the storage capacity is 136MWh
So to compare this "Giant" battery with hydro pumped storage:-

Dinorwig hydro pumped storage can supply 1.728GW, and its storage capacity is 9.1GWh
Cruachan hydro pumped storage can supply 440MW, and its storage capacity is 7.1GWh
The pumped storage scheme proposed by SSE at Coire Glas in Scotland's Great Glen would supply 1.5GW with a storage capacity of 30GWh.
https://www.hydropower.org/blog/pump-it-up-the-case-for-pumped-hydro-storage

TheMotorcycleBoy
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Re: Storage stuff

#429594

Postby TheMotorcycleBoy » July 22nd, 2021, 11:53 am

Anyone else read about this yet?

Startup Claims Breakthrough in Long-Duration Batteries

Form Energy’s iron-air batteries could have big ramifications for storing electricity on the power grid

A four-year-old startup says it has built an inexpensive battery that can discharge power for days using one of the most common elements on Earth: iron.

Form Energy Inc.’s batteries are far too heavy for electric cars. But it says they will be capable of solving one of the most elusive problems facing renewable energy: cheaply storing large amounts of electricity to power grids when the sun isn’t shining and wind isn’t blowing.

The work of the Somerville, Mass., company has long been shrouded in secrecy and nondisclosure agreements. It recently shared its progress with The Wall Street Journal, saying it wants to make regulators and utilities aware that if all continues to go according to plan, its iron-air batteries will be capable of affordable, long-duration power storage by 2025.

Its backers include Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a climate investment fund whose investors include Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates and Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos. Form recently closed a $200 million funding round, led by a strategic investment from steelmaking giant ArcelorMittal SA, MT 4.27% one of the world’s leading iron-ore producers.

Form is preparing to soon be in production of the “kind of battery you need to fully retire thermal assets like coal and natural gas” power plants, said the company’s chief executive, Mateo Jaramillo, who developed Tesla Inc.’s Powerwall battery and worked on some of its earliest automotive powertrains.

On a recent tour of Form’s windowless laboratory, Mr. Jaramillo gestured to barrels filled with low-cost iron pellets as its key advantage in the rapidly evolving battery space. Its prototype battery, nicknamed Big Jim, is filled with 18,000 pebble-size gray pieces of iron, an abundant, nontoxic and nonflammable mineral.
For a lithium-ion battery cell, the workhorse of electric vehicles and today’s grid-scale batteries, the nickel, cobalt, lithium and manganese minerals used currently cost between $50 and $80 per kilowatt-hour of storage, according to analysts.

Using iron, Form believes it will spend less than $6 per kilowatt-hour of storage on materials for each cell. Packaging the cells together into a full battery system will raise the price to less than $20 per kilowatt-hour, a level at which academics have said renewables plus storage could fully replace traditional fossil-fuel-burning power plants.

A battery capable of cheaply discharging power for days has been a holy grail in the energy industry, due to the problem that it solves and the potential market it creates.

Regulators and power companies are under growing pressure to deliver affordable, reliable and carbon-free electricity, as countries world-wide seek to reduce the greenhouse-gas emissions linked to climate change. Most electricity generation delivers two out of three. A long-duration battery could enable renewable energy—wind and solar—to deliver all three.

The Biden administration is pushing for a carbon-free power grid in the U.S. by 2035, and several states and electric utilities have similar pledges. There is widespread agreement that a combination of wind, solar, geothermal and nuclear power mixed with short-duration lithium-ion batteries can generate 80% of electricity. The final 20% will require some type of multiday storage.

“That first 80% we know the technology pathway, and it is already cost competitive,” said Jeremiah Baumann, deputy chief of staff at the Energy Department. “We have a good sense of the technology for the final piece. The real question is which technology is going to get its cost down and get into the marketplace.”

Form’s battery will compete with numerous other approaches in what is becoming a crowded space, as an array of startups race to develop more advanced, cost-effective energy-storage techniques.

Several companies are heading to market with different battery configurations, such as solid-state designs. Some think pumped water storage or compressed air can be used more widely to bank energy. The European Union is pushing the use of hydrogen to store and generate power.

Others, meanwhile, are focusing on carbon-capture technology to make gas- and coal-fired power plants emission-free, which would reduce the need for storing energy.

....

Form Energy’s iron-air battery breathes in oxygen and converts iron to rust, then turns the rust back into iron and breathes out oxygen, charging and discharging the battery in the process.

“There is a Cambrian explosion of new storage technologies and in a Darwinian sense, they are not all going to survive. But the prize is huge both for investors and for society,” says Ramez Naam, a clean-energy investor who isn’t involved with Form Energy.

Previous high-profile efforts to develop better batteries have arced from hope and hype to bankruptcy. But since Form was created in 2017, it has attracted speculation and intrigue within the industry due to the track records of its founders: Mr. Jaramillo and Yet-Ming Chiang, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who co-founded A123 Systems Inc., a lithium-battery pioneer.

Mr. Jaramillo earned degrees in economics and a master’s degree from the Yale Divinity School before switching to a career developing new batteries. After more than seven years at Tesla, he left in 2016 to pursue what he called “The Next Thing” on his LinkedIn page. He didn’t provide any details, but he wanted to build an inexpensive battery for the grid. He was close to signing a funding sheet for a new company when Mr. Chiang called him.

Mr. Chiang arrived at MIT as an undergraduate and joined the faculty less than a decade later. He started working on a long-duration battery in 2012 as part of a Energy Department collaboration. In 2017, he was also working on long-duration batteries and he and Mr. Jaramillo decided to together create Form Energy.

They recruited other battery-industry veterans. “The founding team has 100 years of battery experience,” says Mr. Chiang. “We’re the alumni of a generation of failed battery companies who all came back for more.”

In early 2018, they began small-scale tests, the Ph.D. material scientist’s version of a middle-school science fair’s potato battery, using small pieces of metal wrapped in hardware-store hose clamps at the bottom of translucent measuring cups. Form tested different configurations: sulfur-iron, sulfur-air, sulfur-manganese and iron-air. By the end of the year, iron-air looked the most promising.

...

Late last summer, Form built a one-meter-tall (roughly 3.3-foot-tall) battery it called Slim Jim because it had the dimensions of a trash can of the same name. Earlier this year, it built Big Jim, a full-scale one-meter-by-one-meter battery cell. If it works as expected, 20 of these cells will be grouped in a battery. Thousands of these batteries will be strung together, filling entire warehouses and storing weeks’ worth of electricity. It could take days to fully charge these battery systems, but the batteries can discharge electricity for 150 hours at a stretch.

In 2023, Form plans to deploy a one-megawatt battery capable of discharging continuously for more than six days and says it is in talks with several utilities about battery deployments.

Mr. Chiang, who is the company’s chief science officer, said the challenge was to figure out how to make a battery using iron, air and a water-based electrolyte.


from https://www.wsj.com/articles/startup-cl ... 1626946330

Matt

88V8
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Re: Storage stuff

#429670

Postby 88V8 » July 22nd, 2021, 3:12 pm

TheMotorcycleBoy wrote:Anyone else read about this yet?

.... Several companies are heading to market with different battery configurations, such as solid-state designs.

Form Energy’s iron-air battery breathes in oxygen and converts iron to rust, then turns the rust back into iron...

“There is a Cambrian explosion of new storage technologies and in a Darwinian sense, they are not all going to survive."

'iron to rust then rust to iron'.... if it were April 1st one would have to wonder....

However, if in the process they find a commercial means of turning rust back into iron, that could be rather useful.

It must be very hard knowing which of the many unicorns to back. Quite remarkable when battery technology was for so long a backwater.

V8

spasmodicus
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Re: Storage stuff

#429716

Postby spasmodicus » July 22nd, 2021, 5:26 pm

88V8 wrote:
TheMotorcycleBoy wrote:Anyone else read about this yet?

.... Several companies are heading to market with different battery configurations, such as solid-state designs.

Form Energy’s iron-air battery breathes in oxygen and converts iron to rust, then turns the rust back into iron...

“There is a Cambrian explosion of new storage technologies and in a Darwinian sense, they are not all going to survive."

'iron to rust then rust to iron'.... if it were April 1st one would have to wonder....

However, if in the process they find a commercial means of turning rust back into iron, that could be rather useful.

It must be very hard knowing which of the many unicorns to back. Quite remarkable when battery technology was for so long a backwater.

V8


The idea has been around for a while, but it seems that there are problems that make its commercial realization tricky. There's quite a good summary of the chemistry and those problems here:
https://www.alexhsain.org/blog/ironair
far from being inherently inferior to Li-ion technology, the article asserts
The theoretical energy density of iron-air batteries is 764 Wh kg-1, several times greater than that of Li-ion batteries. The reason lies in the fundamental chemistry: iron-air proceeds via an electrochemical reaction instead of intercalation like in Li-ion.
Fascinating stuff!
S

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Re: Storage stuff

#429843

Postby TheMotorcycleBoy » July 23rd, 2021, 8:41 am

ReallyVeryFoolish wrote:
88V8 wrote:
TheMotorcycleBoy wrote:Anyone else read about this yet?

.... Several companies are heading to market with different battery configurations, such as solid-state designs.

Form Energy’s iron-air battery breathes in oxygen and converts iron to rust, then turns the rust back into iron...

“There is a Cambrian explosion of new storage technologies and in a Darwinian sense, they are not all going to survive."

'iron to rust then rust to iron'.... if it were April 1st one would have to wonder....

However, if in the process they find a commercial means of turning rust back into iron, that could be rather useful.

It must be very hard knowing which of the many unicorns to back. Quite remarkable when battery technology was for so long a backwater.

V8

Already exists. It's called a blast furnace and is certainly not new technology.

RVF

However a blast furnace is not a battery, which is what the article described.

The battery proposed attempts to store and release electrical energy by using reversible reactions.

The mere mention of a blast furnace, whose only possible similarity in this context is that of the involvement of Iron, is irritatingly off-topic in a thread primarily intended for the discussion of "storage".

Your post seemed really very foolish.

Matt

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Re: Storage stuff

#432022

Postby richfool » August 2nd, 2021, 1:47 pm

There's some more on the "New Iron-Air Battery outperforms best Lithium Ion tech. Cheap. Abundant. Non-toxic & Carbon Free." on YouTube Includes comments: "Cheap. Abundant. Non-toxic & Carbon Free"!

https://youtu.be/UDjgSSO98VI

TheMotorcycleBoy
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Re: Storage stuff

#432031

Postby TheMotorcycleBoy » August 2nd, 2021, 2:13 pm

richfool wrote:There's some more on the "New Iron-Air Battery outperforms best Lithium Ion tech. Cheap. Abundant. Non-toxic & Carbon Free." on YouTube Includes comments: "Cheap. Abundant. Non-toxic & Carbon Free"!

https://youtu.be/UDjgSSO98VI

Nice. Good little clip. The energy density and scale implications are interesting. I'm kinda "at work" now so I didn't watch all of it, but skimmed and digested what I could.

I wonder whether it will share the Fe version of Pb's sulphation, i.e. whether they eventually degrade as a pile of rust builds up at the bottom?

Matt

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Re: Storage stuff

#433699

Postby TUK020 » August 10th, 2021, 1:07 pm

88V8 wrote:
ReallyVeryFoolish wrote:Hmmm, struggling with that. A large centrifugal pump, pumping the water uphill operating at best efficiency point would be about 80% efficient. Efficiency on the way back down? I don't know but it isn't going to be anywhere close to 100%

But if the unit cost on the way up is less than the unit income on the way down, then the financially moderated efficiency ........

From what I read online, no significant new pumped storage has been built in the US for many years.
I suspect that batteries will make it another form of dinosaur.

V8

Pumped storage is rather important for a cold start.
If the whole network falls over, you need something with sufficient 'inertia' that you can bring up other generating capacity and sync to it.

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Re: Storage stuff

#433787

Postby spasmodicus » August 10th, 2021, 6:19 pm

ReallyVeryFoolish wrote:As a matter of curiosity, how large does a battery array need to be to store 9.1 gigawatt hours of energy with a peak power rating of 1,728 megawatts? (Dinorwic) And how many times would it be completely rebuilt over say a 100 year operating lifetime? Pumped storage should run at least a 100 years with perhaps one interim re-powering of the main generation hardware.

RVF


well, this one claims to be the biggest so far
https://www.energy-storage.news/manufacturer-reveals-involvement-in-worlds-biggest-battery-energy-storage-system-so-far/
but it's a mere 300 megawatts power rating and 1.2 Gigawatt hours capacity. But the article says......could later be expanded in size and capacity to host as much as 1,500MW / 6,000MWh of energy storage, should market and economic conditions make that feasible.

It would then be nearly up to Dinorwig's rating, but as can be seen in the picture, it's quite big and I bet it didn't come cheap.

S

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Re: Storage stuff

#435771

Postby Hallucigenia » August 18th, 2021, 7:07 pm

This is good, giving an overview of lithium mineralogy and extraction, then comparing neighbouring projects either side of the Chile-Argentina border, SQM and Albemarle in the Salar de Atacama and in the Cauchari-Olaroz basin, Livent’s Hombre Muerto, Sales de Jujuy (Orocobre)’s Olaroz and Minera Exar's (Ganfeng/Lithium Americas) Cauchari.

https://www.jadecove.com/research/enoughlithium

This tries to forecast battery mineral demand bearing in mind likely changes in chemistries :
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43246-020-00095-x
For Li and Co, demand could outgrow current production capacities even before 2025. For Ni, the situation appears to be less dramatic, although by 2040 EV batteries alone could consume as much as the global primary Ni production in 2019. Other battery materials could be supplied without exceeding existing production capacities (Supplementary Tables 9 and 10), although supplies may still have to increase to meet demands from other sectors5,9. The known reserves for Li, Ni, and Co (black lines in Fig. 4) could be depleted before 2050 in the SD scenario and for Co also in the STEP scenario. For all other materials known reserves exceed demand from EV batteries until 2050 (Supplementary Table 5). In 2019 around 64% of natural graphite and 64% of Si are produced in China32, which could create vulnerabilities to supply reliability33. However, synthetic graphite has begun to dominate the LIB graphite anode market (56% market share in 2018) due to its superior performance and decreasing cost over natural graphite17. Thus, among EV battery materials Co and Li, and to a lesser extent Ni and graphite, can be considered to be most critical concerning the upscaling of production capacities (see Supplementary Table 9), reserves and other supply risks, which confirms previous findings5,9,10,33,34 even without taking into consideration the potential additional demand from heavy-duty vehicles15 and other sectors16. In contrast to Li and Ni, Co reserves are also geographically more concentrated and partly in conflict areas35, thus increasing potential supply risks5. Battery manufacturers are already seeking to decrease their reliance on cobalt, e.g., by lowering the Co content of NCM batteries; however, as shown in Fig. 3, an absolute decoupling is unlikely to occur in the coming decades.

Hallucigenia
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Re: Storage stuff

#436832

Postby Hallucigenia » August 23rd, 2021, 12:07 pm

An example of why you can't assume a lithium infrastructure will just appear overnight - the processing plant at Kwinana in Western Australia was announced in 2016 with a target of "operational toward the end of 2018"

Instead they have just announced the first production of lithium hydroxide, and won't produce battery-grade until 2022. And massively over budget as well.

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Re: Storage stuff

#436858

Postby Hallucigenia » August 23rd, 2021, 2:43 pm

"Batteries are very hard" - technical director of the University of Michigan’s Battery Lab

Looks like GM-LG Energy (now spun out of LG proper) were in such a rush to beat Tesla to market with the Bolt, they didn't check whether their manufacturing was up to scratch. Took a $800m charge last year, looks like the latest recall will cost them $1bn, after five caught fire. Do feel sorry for the woman in wildfire country who is waiting for a fix and meanwhile can't sell a car that could be a firebomb.

Image

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Re: Storage stuff

#445053

Postby Hallucigenia » September 24th, 2021, 2:36 pm

Came across this as another example of how things are progressing, team at Monash using glucose in lithium-sulphur to increase the charge cycles by 10-20x to be comparable with lithium ion but 2-5x the capacity per gram.

https://www.ragus.co.uk/sugar-in-batteries/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-25612-5

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Re: Storage stuff

#453282

Postby Hallucigenia » October 26th, 2021, 4:59 pm

Lithium prices continue to rise, AIUI US$2350/t for 5.5% spodumene concentrate in Pilbara's latest auction is an all-time record :

http://www.pilbaraminerals.com.au/site/ ... BMXAuction

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Re: Storage stuff

#488630

Postby Hallucigenia » March 23rd, 2022, 5:14 pm

This is a fun paper from Princeton, modelling dispatchable geothermal by overpressuring a fracced rockbed. Claim 61-91% roundtrip efficiency, and a 60% increase in economic value for minimal additional capex.

https://zenodo.org/record/6377485

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SSE and Storage stuff

#490867

Postby BullDog » April 1st, 2022, 3:36 pm

A fascinating announcement yesterday by SSE venturing into battery storage and green hydrogen generation. I like what SSE are doing presently. Very much.

https://fuelcellsworks.com/news/sse-ren ... wind-farm/


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