Organic Redox Flow Batteries - The true path to grid scale energy storage?

those of you that watch this channel regularly will know that there's a bit of a global race on to find sustainable and cost-effective ways to store energy so that micro and macro power generators can utilize intermittent renewables like solar and wind more efficiently and reliably it's an absolutely crucial element of the transition away from fossil fuels in our struggle to keep our average atmospheric temperatures below 2 degrees celsius above pre-industrial levels one of those energy storage options is a technology called redox flow batteries which is not something i've yet looked at on this channel redox flow batteries represent a promising alternative to lithium-ion batteries but the systems currently available on the market have a bit of an environmental achilles heel they all use a scarce and expensive metal called vanadium in a fairly nasty toxic acid solution as the basis for their electrolytes and most of them also use an oil-based polymer called polyacryla nitrile for the electrodes so scaling the whole thing up to provide national grid level storage solutions could have potentially problematic environmental implications but in late october 2020 that hurdle looks to have been overcome by a team of researchers from sweden's linker ping university who claim to have designed a redox flow battery using all organic materials so i guess now is probably a good time to take a look at how it all works hello and welcome to just everthink redox flow batteries are a brilliant idea they're a kind of cross between a battery and a fuel cell and they're very easily scalable the basic setup is two tanks of electrolyte liquid containing solutions of vanadium the vanadium ions in each tank have different chemical configurations so that one tank acts as a positive electrolyte and the other tank acts as a negative electrolyte in between them there's a cell stack the solutions from each tank are pumped into the cell stack where they're separated by a thin membrane as the system discharges the ions in the negatively charged solution release an electron in a process the science body's called oxidation those electrons move towards an electrode in this cell stack and go out through a circuit to do their useful electrical work before returning to another electrode on the other side of the stack that electrode feeds the electrons into the positively charged solution which is happy to receive them the process on that side is known as reduction you can see where i'm going here can't you yes you guessed it the reduction and oxidation processes are what gives redox flow batteries their name anyway i haven't quite finished the full cycle yet the reduction process frees up positively charged hydrogen ions which flow across the membrane to maintain the charge balance the whole thing is completely reversible so the system can be recharged now if you're thinking that all that sounds a bit like what happens in a lithium-ion battery then you'd be right lithium-ion batteries have proved to be a transformational technology not just for our modern electronic gadgets but increasingly for domestic energy storage and of course for electric vehicles so why don't we just scale them up to use them as grid energy storage too well you've no doubt already seen instances where exactly that is happening the most famous of which is probably the tesla installation at hornsdale wind farm in south australia but that size of installation is really pushing the limits of what lithium-ion can achieve in any kind of cost-effective way they've got great energy density but they're still pretty expensive and they're only really good for about four hours of discharge to provide frequency regulation or grid balancing and as anyone who's ever owned a mobile phone knows they also lose capacity over time plus we've got the well-documented issues of lithium supply levels and cobalt sourced from appalling artisan mines in the drc redox flow batteries have a lower energy density but they can be really easily scaled up to theoretically unlimited energy capacity simply by using larger electrolyte storage tanks they can also be left charged or completely discharged for very long periods without degrading they are a lot safer than lithium-ion batteries too if the electrolytes in a flow battery accidentally get mixed there's no fire or explosion and the battery doesn't get damaged they can be discharged down to about ninety percent or more and they can be cycled between fifteen and twenty thousand times which is way better than the four to five thousand cycles of lithium ion all of that makes them cheap and cheap is something that grid operators are quite keen on but that problem of vanadium electrolytes and poly acrylic nitrile electrodes is definitely a wrinkle that developers would very much like to iron out as these things get more and more integrated into large-scale grids not just to drive costs down still further but also to avoid the environmental impact of drilling and mining for those materials lots of research had already been taking place before the swedish team published their findings most recently in april 2020 from a team of scientists at the university of south california who published a paper in the journal of the electrochemical society demonstrating a flow battery using an electrolyte solution combining iron sulfate which is a cheap and plentiful waste product of the mining industry with something called anthraquinone disulfonic acid or aqds based on quinone which is an organic material that the team reckon can be derived from any carbon-based feedstock including carbon dioxide they claim the material costs for their battery will be about 66 dollars per kilowatt hour which is less than half the cost of the vanadium version that research already represents a big step forward for flow battery technology providing an important boost to get this method of energy storage adopted on a much wider commercial scale but this latest research from the team at linkaping university over in sweden has taken the concept a couple of very important steps further not least from an environmental point of view if you watched our video about energy storage in bricks from a couple of weeks ago you may remember me talking about a conducting organic polymer called pedot well it turns out that pedot is proving a popular choice because that's precisely what the swedish team have used to coat the carbon electrodes in their flow battery system they used chemical doping to manipulate the pedot into a state that will transport either positive ions or negative ions so you can effectively have a cathode and an anode like a normal battery with both made from the same material and just like the usc team they've also used quinone molecules to form the basis of their electrolyte solution it's called ars which their research paper refers to as a sulfonated anthraquinone derivative that becomes anionic in aqueous solution that gives it the important distinction of being water-based and not acid-based their principal research engineer mikhail vagin says quinones can be derived from wood but here we've used the same molecule together with different variants of the conducting polymer pellet it turns out that they are highly compatible with each other which is like a gift from the natural world that high compatibility has the advantage that the pedal electrodes improve the ability of the quinone molecules to switch between their oxidized and their reduced states which in turn creates the flow of protons and electrons vagin calls the process ion selective electrocatalysis and he points out that while the effect probably exists in other types of membrane storage devices like batteries fuel cells and supercapacitors it's never been properly identified and deliberately exploited as an advantageous process before now one caveat is that their organic version of the redox flow battery does have a lower energy density than the existing vanadium versions but just like the usc system this new setup is extremely cheap the swedish battery is also totally recyclable and completely safe in operation that important safety factor will no doubt be a very attractive selling point for grid scale operators but it also offers the potential for smaller versions of the system to be made commercially available to domestic homeowners who've got a bit of space in a garage or an outbuilding to use these things as a cheap alternative to a power wall for their home and as a charger for their electric vehicles another great step in a very positive direction as always of course we need it out of the laboratory and onto the market as quickly as possible but one of the several countries already enthusiastically developing flow batteries is china and as well as funding from various swedish foundations this research also received a grant from china's scholarship council so if you're a big european or american tech investor with a bit of cash burning a hole in your pocket i suggest you get in touch with these folks pretty soon if you don't want our friends in the people's republic to gain yet another competitive advantage over the rest of the sustainable technology world that's it for this week do have a look at the just everything app if you get a chance it's not just a handy way to get my videos directly from your phone's home screen each week is also a news aggregator bringing you daily news and articles from thousands of sources around the world on climate and sustainable technology the part i really like is that you don't have to register any of your information to use it and there's no ads on the app itself so what you get is a completely free to use platform that just gives you the content you want and nothing else i must also say a big thank you to our supporters over at patreon who allow me to keep the channel ad free and maintain independent content and a special shout out to the folks who've joined since last time with pledges of 10 or more a month they are marjorie leonard robbie hoesgood marcus robin melia wayne harrison eric phillips chris floyd pair anders enqvist bob haywood richard clark janis casparis alex butcher sebastian flock and stephen pender and of course a big thank you to everyone else who's joined since last time too you can get involved with all of that if you want to by visiting www.patreon.com forward slash just have a think and of course you can hugely support the channel absolutely for free by subscribing and hitting that like button and make sure you hit the little bell icon too so you get notified when new videos come out dead easy to subscribe you just need to click down there somewhere 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 you

Channel: Just Have a Think

Views: 98,854

Rating: 4.9718804 out of 5

Keywords: redox flow battery, organic redox flow battery, energy storage, renewable energy, sustainable technology

Id: YyzQsVzKylE

Length: 10min 47sec (647 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 08 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Mr_Koreander]

41,000 views, 178,000 subscribers. What was that you said about the A.C. and inversion?

[u/LordHughRAdumbass]

The energy storage problem is solved! We'll just make batteries from pure Unobtainium.

“As such there is no business case for vanadium batteries if resources remain few and far between, controlled by the Chinese and predicated on outdated pollutive and inefficient methods of extraction.”

Similarly, Curtis Moore, vice president of marketing and corporate development at Energy Fuels (TSX:EFR,NYSEAMERICAN:UUUU), said price volatility makes it extremely difficult to be a western vanadium producer.

https://investingnews.com/daily/resource-investing/battery-metals-investing/vanadium-investing/vanadium-outlook/

Oh you poor deluded fucks.

Here's the detox program for engineers:

1. Give up.
2. Deindustrialize.
3. Purge your type from the human gene pool.