Battery Fueled by Iron and Water Could Transform the Power Grid

this episode of the good stuff has been brought to you by ESS Inc this is a vineyard in Sonoma California the solar panels you see their power the irrigation next to it underneath that tree is a battery but it's unlike most batteries you've ever encountered because it could power your house just as easily as it could fertilize that tree and it could help solve one of the biggest obstacles preventing the wider use of renewable energy on that battery sited underneath a 500 year old California oak every time we tell the story the oak gets more and more old use I think 100 year old when we first started but now it's enough mm yeah this is Craig Evans president and CEO of energy storage systems incorporated or ESS Inc but yeah so when the arborist came in and did that analysis for studying the battery underneath the tree because there was concern he basically looked at the chemicals and basically said this is just a fertilizer for the tree if there was any issues and so wow that's amazing called an iron flow battery esss design promises long duration large-scale energy storage with little to no environmental impact and it's all possible because of the unique chemistry of the battery it's mostly water but first let's talk about why we even need a new kind of battery so what we do here is essentially we're trying to change the battery technology the batteries you're most familiar with are small they're in your phone they fit in the palm of your hand but we need batteries for more than powering our personal electronics batteries could solve one of the biggest problems facing the power grid large-scale renewable energy storage the grid has problems so we need the batteries to come in to compensate renewables tend to be intermittent the Sun tends to only shine during the day during the morning time in the evening time there's pretty steep ramps when the Sun comes up and the solar panels come online they come online pretty hard and the grid wasn't really designed to handle that kind of energy surge it's used to the constant predictable energy output of fossil fuel plants not the intermittency of renewables and so if you're gonna include storage in that application you can now store that electricity and then push it to the evening time or push it to the morning time and the most common type of battery you've probably heard of being proposed for this type of energy storage is lithium ion this is the same kind of battery found in your phone or laptop but it's not the only battery technology we have at our disposal you can use all kinds of chemistry's to make a battery you can even make a battery out of something as simple as iron and water yes so our batteries a little bit different our batteries are flowe battery a flow battery is an electrochemical cell where two chemical solutions are separated by a membrane ions are exchanged across this membrane producing chemical energy and electricity see that shipping container that's not only used to transport the battery it is the battery that's right you can go inside it and that's exactly what I'm gonna do yes so now you're coming into our containers so if you turn around look over there that's where we store the energy so you think about this 40-foot shipping containers are really separate that happen happen what happens is basically all the chemicals that use the store energy is in there and then the other half is what we call the power module half so the battery module is there to make the electricity happen called an energy warehouse ESS is designed is particularly well suited for long duration storage up to four hours or more and so there hasn't been really a need for long duration storage up until this point because there hasn't been a large prevalence of renewables being put on the grid but now with the larger duration of renewables we now need some way to shift bulk amounts of electricity this means that excess renewable energy on the grid that would otherwise be wasted or underutilized can be captured and saved until it's needed typical lithium-ion batteries can only do this up to one or two hours ESS makes iron full of batteries which can use iron and saltwater some of the most common substances on earth so it's extremely abundant and extremely safe in fact it's basically the same as fertilizer that's why it was good for the tree in the beginning you can basically install these iron flow batteries anywhere without worrying about hurting the environment which isn't necessarily the case with other types of batteries so if you have a lead acid battery for example it's they've got a very negative pH stick your hand in it you're gonna get burnt lithium-ion base batteries we run organic electrolyte ii be flammable so you've probably heard about this it's been in the news samsung phones have caught fires so have some battery powered cars lithium-ion batteries can even explode under certain circumstances so the require fire suppression systems in addition to that the fire code will require safety perimeters or they can't be sited in urban areas or hazmat suits required for for installation and iron flow it doesn't need doesn't have any of those problem we do not write that no fire risk in fact we operate around 50 degrees centigrade or well-suited for desert environments or hot environments equatorial regions and then since we're an aqueous battery risk of water based battery the pH is very similar to soda or wine but you probably wanna drink it you don't want to drink it but you couldn't get you wouldn't nothing bad would happen for sale unless you drink an abundant amount okay so if you don't drink all the electrolyte in iron flow battery also lasts a long time a typical lithium ion battery will only last a couple years before it begins to lose the ability to charge this is called capacity fade or degradation so everybody carries a lithium ion battery in their pocket their cell phone and the day you buy your cell phone it lasts for a full day on that single charge but a year in that that cell phone now is gonna be dead by 12 o'clock lunch time when that is typically due to cycle every time you charge the battery you lose a little bit of capacity and when you're integrating with renewables those renewables are going to want to cycle the battery everyday maybe once or two times a day and say you want a battery that really has no capacity fade and your battery it has no capacity that's right so this battery that we delivered to the customer on day 1 will have exactly the same capacity in year 20 and when an iron flow battery finally gets to the end of its life disposal is relatively simple since iron and water aren't toxic that's not the case with a lot of other batteries they can be composed of hazardous materials that pollute the environment while most batteries can be recycled the process is often complicated or expensive or both in our case our battery is 100% recyclable so at the end of life you can take that electrolyte that was in your battery for 20 years and you could put it another battery when you're just dealing with iron and water recycling is a snap the way we look at it is when you're when you're utilizing precious metals or rare earth elements for battery technology you got to look at the full life stream of those materials and how you gonna recycle them as opposed to going in and trying to strip the earth form or those elements when we only first started the company you know we like to say that we can build our battery at Home Depot materials are pretty prevalent we use PV see plumbing sometime will be missing up hard so it's sort of harder than come in our engineer would just go to Home Depot pick up the different parts and make it up not a sponsor Home Depot okay so not only is the battery composed of some of the most common elements on earth you can find the parts to build it at almost any hardware store and it comes with its own shipping container being inside of that iron flow battery I have to say wasn't what I imagined being inside a battery would be like it seemed more like something that would be part of a hydroponic garden or a giant aquarium than something electrical for something that could be the future of renewable energy storage it looked surprisingly low-tech but just one of these shipping containers can provide 50 kilowatts of electricity that's enough to power an entire neighborhood block for six hours iron flow batteries have to be this big because they're not as energy dense as a lithium ion battery so these kind of batteries won't be going in your phone or even your car but that's not what they're designed for our market is very large-scale storage and require cycle multiple cycles a day for a very long period of time those are our markets as well as providing energy storage for the Sonoma vineyard we saw at the beginning esss flow batteries are right now being used at a wind farm in Texas and on an experimental micro grid at the University of California in San Diego even the US military has shown interest in these batteries the Army Corps of Engineers is currently testing ESS is designed to see if it can effectively reduce the military's dependence on fossil fuel and a few iron flow batteries have even made their way to Europe and South America what do you need to do to take over what needs to happen get the word out getting the word out is one I think you know we've we formed the company in 2011 we've been heavily involved in making sure that our our technology is solid and that we are at a you know a capex cost that is either at with you mind or less than lithium-ion prices and that we can backup our warranty and back up our guarantees that you'll have zero capacity fade and you have zero efficiency decrease over the 20 to 25 years so you know the more and more renewables that come on the grid the more and more requirements for batteries so it's gonna be a battery just gonna get battery world yeah alright in the future our energy use will continue to grow and the type and variety of batteries we use will grow along with it there is no single battery that can solve all of our energy problems in all likelihood it'll take batteries of all kinds big and small with chemistry's that cover a good chunk of the periodic table so if it's going to be a battery world having a battery that's as good for our energy needs as it is for the planet is more important than ever [Music] so ESS Inc sponsored this video and they helped us make it but we wouldn't have done this video in the first place if we didn't think what they were doing was super cool and super important and good enough to be called the good stuff if you want to learn more about ESS is all iron flow battery you can check them out at ESS inc.com and there's a link in the description as well but what do you think is the iron flow battery a viable method of energy storage is this what the future of batteries is going to look like let us know in the comment

Channel: The Good Stuff

Views: 443,782

Rating: 4.8675036 out of 5

Keywords: the good stuff, scishow, crash course, vsauce, idea channel, education, wheezy waiter, wheezywaiter, joe hanson, craig benzine, vlogbrothers, power grid, battery, all iron flow battery, lithium ion battery, energy, energy storage, long duration, future, ESS, energy storage systems, batteries, environment, green energy, renewable energy, iron, water, properties of water, electricity, science, climate change, global warming, solar energy, power, technology, wind turbine

Id: HmtI8Wat7rY

Length: 9min 25sec (565 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 28 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/TheKingOfCryo]

Very happy to see ESS doing a little PR now that they have systems in the field.

Applications for 6-10 hours of energy capacity with more than one cycle per day is where flow batteries can grab away market share.

Hopefully these guys will be one of the flow based designs that makes it.