Liquid Metal Batteries. Are they an economic possibility?

this guy is called donald sadaway and i'm guessing that's a name that many of you are already very familiar with donald is a materials chemistry professor at the massachusetts institute of technology or mit and for about a decade now he and his team have been developing a technology that he's always claimed will revolutionize energy storage it's called a liquid metal battery and professor sadaway is certainly not shy about extolling its virtues he reckons it's a zero maintenance virtually zero degradation high temperature chemistry that can outperform lithium-ion batteries on cost and performance the only slight snag is it hasn't at least not yet anyway despite a 35 million cash injection in 2014 from investors including bill gates and total saturday's startup company ambry struggled to reach his lofty goals with disappointing results in 2016 leading to the laying off of a quarter of the team but saddleway has shown himself to be an extremely dogged and persistent innovator and he's refused to give up on his quest keeping the company going and pushing development as hard as possible in the four years between then and now and that determination and drive might just be about to pay off because in november 2020 ambry struck its first major commercial deal to supply a 250 megawatt hour liquid metal battery storage system to a huge data center due to stark construction in reno nevada in 2021 now the tried and tested safe bet for terrascale who were the company running the construction project would have been to use utility-scale lithium-ion batteries but instead they've chosen to take a pretty big financial risk on a technology that's so far not been proven in a commercial environment so what is it that terrascale have seen in saddleways invention that's convinced them to take the plunge hello and welcome to just everything in october 2020 the international energy agency published its world energy outlook report which states that global greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced by 40 percent in the next nine years if the world is to reach carbon neutrality by 2050. we're miles off that of course not even close 2020 was a bit of an aberration for obvious reasons but once everyone's had a couple of doses of vaccine no doubt we'll all feel invincible again and much of society will return to its pre-pandemic high consumption habits meanwhile in the background a herculean effort is being undertaken by grid operators all over the world to integrate low or zero carbon technologies onto their systems as quickly as possible in an effort to meet the challenge bloomberg new energy finance projects that by 2050 solar and wind will be producing 56 percent of all power consumed globally with hydro and nuclear providing a further 21 and the remaining gasified power plants and tiny number of coal plants assuming they even exist at all by then will be smothered in expensive carbon capture and storage systems to enable that volume of renewable energy to actually keep the lights on around the clock 365 days a year we're going to need a level of grid scale energy storage that makes our current provision look like a couple of double a batteries in the back of a radio and that's why we've been discovering and explaining so many different energy storage technologies on this channel over the last couple of years we'll probably need all of them and then some right now though the dominant technology is of course lithium-ion batteries they're doing a pretty decent job and by dint of sheer economy of scale they are the cheapest option currently available they've got pretty good energy density and can respond to frequency fluctuations on the grid within milliseconds but they were never designed for very large utility scale implementation they're much better suited for use as single cells for laptops and phones once you start connecting them together in bulk they have to be quite carefully monitored and managed to keep voltages balanced across the cells and to keep temperatures down to safe working levels and because the electrodes are made of solid material they suffer tiny amounts of damage each time they get hit by lithium ions during the charge and discharge phases and that damage is permanent and it accumulates over time which leads to battery degradation and then there's the dreaded dendrites you've probably heard about them essentially they're a buildup of lithium deposits on the anode which grow into long thin filaments that can eventually travel across the electrolyte separator and reach the cathode on the other side causing a fairly dramatic short circuit professor sadaway reckons he's got the answer to all these drawbacks with his liquid metal chemistry not many metals are liquid at normal working temperatures and the metals in ambry's system are no exception now you might think given our experience of what could happen to a lithium-ion battery at very high temperatures that deliberately heating up your anode and cathode towards their melting point is an extremely bad idea indeed but sadaway didn't start with lithium-ion batteries he started with a nice crisp piece of blank paper on which he sketched out a fundamentally different way of constructing an electrochemical energy storage device admittedly there has been a massive amount of experimentation over the years to get the optimal choice of materials but the basic principle has never changed and it's this the solid antimony and calcium alloy are combined at room temperature with a solid electrolyte and put inside a sealed chamber insulated with a ceramic material think of it a bit like a mini kiln the whole thing is encased in a positively polarized case with a negative terminal sticking out the top at room temperature you've got nothing more than an extremely heavy inanimate object in their solid states it's impossible for the internal elements to react with each other to generate electricity that means the batteries are completely safe for transport once they're in situ and set up though an electrical current heats them up to 500 degrees celsius which causes the metals and the salt electrolyte to move to a molten state and then gravity takes over separating them out according to their density the antimony sinks the molten salt stays in the middle and the calcium alloy rises to the top at this stage the battery is charged and ready to go antimony and calcium exist at opposite ends of the periodic table and for reasons that are outside the scope of this video anti-money is more electronegative than calcium which means there's a potential difference between them so when a device is placed in the circuit the calcium alloy breaks down into calcium ions and electrons the ions are attracted down to the antimony and the electrons get there by flowing through the external circuit so you may be thinking that's just a very hot version of a standard battery but discharging this system results in a completely new alloy of antimony and calcium with the molten electrolyte sitting on top and because it's a liquid there's no permanent deformation or damage as the calcium ions hit the antimony and dendrites aren't a thing either because there's no solid surface for anything to build up on to recharge the system you simply use the electrical current from your renewable power sources to reverse the reaction which causes the calcium alloy and the antimony to reform to their original positions after the initial input of electricity the reaction generates its own heat keeping the battery at optimum working temperature and eliminating the need for an external heat source sadaway argues that the beauty of the system is in its simplicity he points out that unlike lithium-ion batteries these things actually like to be worked hard ideally being fully charged and discharged every couple of days to maintain their constant high temperature his team's research analysis showed an overall end-to-end efficiency of 80 percent which is higher than pumped hydro and saturaway says operators can expect tens of thousands of cycles with negligible degradation or capacity fade and because they have a self-maintaining temperature the batteries will work just as safely and effectively in very cold climates like the arctic or very hot climates like for example india where there's an urgent focus on getting renewables onto the grid as quickly as possible if for some reason the battery gets tipped over causing a short circuit between the metals then you will get a pretty big spike in temperature but still well within the insulating capacity of the ceramic enclosure after that the reaction simply stops and the whole thing cools back down to the inanimate lump you started with no dramatic fires or explosions like the ones we occasionally hear about with lithium-ion and you're still left with a functional battery too just stick a current through it again and the metals dutifully separate back out into their charged up positions ready to go again the biggest challenge that ambry faces is the economy of scale hurdle that all technologies face when they first get going but according to bloomberg new energy finance the cost of the electrode materials for ambry's battery are only about a third of the cost of the electrode materials in a lithium ion battery and the kickstart to scale production that ambry so desperately needs may well come in the form of that deal with terrascale that i mentioned right at the start of the programme the project is called energos reno it's a 3700 acre site which will have its own micro grid comprising 500 megawatts of renewable capacity powering a massive data center that'll likely be used by commercial clients and government agencies if ambry's 250 megawatt hour installation does what it says in the tin then professor saddaway may finally see the floodgates open for the technology he's dedicated himself to for more than a decade and history may come to record his contribution to energy storage on a similar level to john b good enough's revolutionary lithium-ion breakthrough several decades earlier judging by the large number of people who asked me to take a look at this technology for the channel i'm quite sure there'll be some strong opinions on liquid metal batteries and the trajectory of energy storage in general so jump down to the comment section below and leave your thoughts there that's it for this week though thanks to our fantastic patreon supporters who help keep the channel independent and keep these videos ad free and a quick shout out to the folks who've joined since last time with pledges of 10 or more a month they are david fain jonathan jarvis marcel ward alexander siraz rob van der vaow ryan milikovic amy hemeter mark green colin meyer john comstock and colin cochran and of course a big thank you to everyone else who's joined since last time too you can support the channel and receive exclusive news updates from me plus the chance to select future video topics in monthly content polls by visiting forward slash www.patreon.com have a think and of course you can hugely support the channel absolutely for free by subscribing and hitting that like button and if you want to be notified about new content each week make sure you hit that little bell icon too dead easy to subscribe you just need to click down there or on that icon there as always thanks very much for watching have a great week and remember to just have a think see you next week

Channel: Just Have a Think

Views: 150,326

Rating: 4.9569106 out of 5

Keywords: donald sadoway, ambri, liquid metal batteries, sustainable technology, energy storage, grid scale storage, utility scale storage

Id: VNCC8QGy_u0

Length: 11min 51sec (711 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 17 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/mlrotter]

Maybe for energy storage, but liquid batteries don't work in cars. The layers are separated by density of the liquids, and can't be mixed/shaken when in use.

[u/lommer0]

Really great video, well worth watching. Good info, no bullshit, hits all the main points quickly and clearly. More youtubers could learn from this guy.

Based on the content though I'm not sure I agree it's a tech poised for massive disruption. It's not suitable for long duration storage due to the temp requirements, so the only viable application is daily/weekly cycling. Round trip cycle efficiency of only 80%, while this is much better than pumped hydro, it's far short of Li-ion's >90%. This is critically important with a high-cycle system as the value of that lost energy starts to become really material over the project life. The advantages of temp resilience in different climates and safety issues are all being effectively solved with proper engineering in Li-ion deployments today. So it's only real chance to compete is on costs. Can the lower capital cost and longer battery life outweigh the cost of energy lost to efficiency? I hope so because it means cheaper sustainable energy for all of us, but with the great strides in cycle life that Li-ion is making all the time that hurdle keeps getting harder and harder to clear.

Thank you for posting, I enjoyed the video and learned a lot!

[u/DukeInBlack]

Very good video! It would be interesting compare or have an estimate of some battery performance parameters but, as OP says, we need all the possible brainpower to work the long term problem of energy production and distribution.

Just my personal take, but centralized power plants like fossil fuel ones, will go out of business not because political pressure on climate change, but because cost of operations. They are or will be the equivalent of mainframe computers at the turn of the ‘80.

[u/bazyli-d]

Very interesting thanks for sharing

[u/lazy2late]

very good science animations about a topic any tsla should be researching, how many different types of batteries should tsla be researching

[u/Weary-Depth-1118]

https://vimeo.com/335818817 3.5 cents / kWh of energy storage

https://youtu.be/3jIS9fPDTbo?t=928

[u/Ningudo]

Tesla should be putting serious money on researching future upcoming battery technologies such as solid state/liquid metal if not that would probably be a mistake

[u/IS_JOKE_COMRADE]

Remindme! 10 hours