The Liquid Metal Battery: Innovation in stationary electricity storage

thank you so much for coming out on this cold winter evening it's my great pleasure to introduce professor Donald Sadoway who is the John f elliot's professor of materials chemistry the Massachusetts Institute of Technology I'm going to leave it to Don to talk to you about what he does but I think it's important to share with you a quick story about how I know him I studied all of my lectures in the room that you're sitting in now as a mechanical engineer knowing nothing about chemistry at all and then I moved to do a PhD across the road in the materials Department and my first group meeting was terrifying lots of words that I did not know the meaning of so I went online desperately searching for help and found Don's course introduction to solid state chemistry available through the MIT platform still today one of the best courses I've ever done absolutely fantastic insight in introduction to the topic and has been watched by many tens of thousands of people around the world what's extraordinary to think and Don as you will find out shortly is an excellent communicator and he's going to share with us his work in liquid metal batteries so thank you very much Don well thank you for the kind words it's a pleasure to be here actually I came here in December of 1972 I was thinking about coming here as a PhD candidate was shown around and went back to Canada and stayed in University of Toronto there were some personal factors here but I must say that the place has changed a little bit since 1972 for the better but I've always had a very strong curiosity about Imperial College so what I want to do today is talk about innovation and sustainability and there's going to be at least two tracks running at the same time one is going to be the narrative about what went on in the in science and the other is going to be about the discovery process itself and maybe there's something transferable from what I've learned so is it doing that alright so there's gonna be two chapters what I call tough tech when you're working in energy forget all the stuff that they talk about in Silicon Valley and gogo and innovation and so on this is heavy industry it's really hard all that stuff doesn't apply it's a really really long slog I like to begin with this image which reminds us that electricity is tantamount to modernity everything that we value as a 21st century technology is predicated on the availability of electricity and where you see light in this image that's where you see the modern world where you don't see light it's one of two conditions and Sue's either nobody lives there or the place hasn't been electrified and if it hasn't been electrified there's nothing more important and you can give those people than access to electricity and if you're going to add electricity here you don't have to build a grid by gigantic power plants coal-fired power plants nuclear power plants you could put solar panels and then add in the storage and away you go so we want to have sustainable electricity for a sustainable modernity and that's that's where I want to go with this and this is even on the charts when it comes to the United Nations they have a 17 sustainable development goals so there it as a goal number seven it's affordable and clean energy and that includes even things like carbon-based fuels that you know people who are cooking all over the world the developing world are cooking with these really foul fuels that emit and if they could cook with clean fuel that would be fantastic but electricity is right in there so storage is the key enabler for this first of all if you want to talk about massive deployment of wind and solar these are intermittent and therefore they can't by themselves be fully integrated into base load so that means if you don't have storage to bridge the gap when the Sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow then you're gonna have to back this up with some carbon fired whether it's diesel or gas or what have you and it's going to give you the most expensive electricity as we can see in Germany right now the most expensive electricity in Europe and with all of this so-called sustainability so why I mean nobody wants that and let me tell you renewables - storage is not a solution because the way that the grid operates supply must be in perfect balance with demand everywhere at all times so that electricity powering the lights here was generated just moments ago if all of a sudden we have abundant excess electricity that's generated by solar and it exceeds the demand you can't do anything with it if you generate it it goes in the wires and the the line voltage goes up and you imagine if instead of plugging in and what are you supposed to be here 220 240 what's your voltage 240 so instead of 240 you get to 60 or 265 you'll blow up your devices and if it's if the supply doesn't meet demand well we all know what happens there you go to brown out conditions so you have to have storage and what you're looking at here is the world's largest supply chain with zero inventory and today's grid is so crazy we have generation capacity sufficient to meet peak demand and peak demand is about a 1/3 to 1/2 more than average demand so you've got all this capacity sitting there idle about 98% of the time if you had storage you could shave off the peaks and you wouldn't have to build new plants and so on so you say well it sounds like I've made a compelling case for storage so why don't we have it maybe it's because what just the dummies go into electrochemistry is that it no no it's because this is the toughest problem how tough is it long service lifetime forget your phone your phone you toss it about every two years anybody here have a 10 year old phone no anybody have a 10 year old phone somebody once said I do and I said you have the original battery of course he doesn't have the original battery all right so we have to have a battery in the last decades not months decades safe lithium-ion batteries catch fire if it's a single phone it's a bad day for a single passenger on an airplane scares the rest of us but you know so what just one phone but imagine a battery the size of this auditorium lithium-ion it catches fire it's spectacular operationally flexible the grid has all there's 17 different electrical functions on the grid some of them are short duration things like frequency regulation then there are things like load leveling load following peak shifting I mean these are long duration so you have one set of applications the more like a spreader and the others are more like a marathoner you know the person that can run 100 meters in ten seconds doesn't run a marathon in an hour and fifteen minutes that person probably couldn't even finish the marathon because there's a different kind of training but the battery the battery can power a hearing aid can't power an electric car but this thing has to do everything or else you're going to have different batteries for different functions and that's gonna be really crazy but this is what kills it it has to be super low cost how low it's not battery versus battery so don't ask me both flow batteries or other stuff none of them work now I'm work in this application at the price point it's battery versus combustion it's battery versus gases battery versus diesel because hydrocarbons are BIC WA tiss and heavily subsidized and deeply entrenched by corporate interests that don't want to just willingly go away and say we've had our day and it's great to see this zero emissions generation they're gonna fight to keep it so when I started working on this around 2006 2007 I reasoned that if cost is what's the it's what's present preventing widespread deployment of storage I have to invent to the price point and our reasons that the classical approach in the university doesn't work the classical approaches you get your research grant and you invent the coolest chemistry and you publish in the best journals you can you build your career and maybe you'll spin out a company that will work they'll chase down the cost curve but they won't get low enough in this market so if you want to compete against hydrocarbons you have to think about cost on day one not Dave one thousand so that changed everything the way I thought about it and before I launch into this I want to have this last comment about the by way of introduction let's not forget that the battery was invented at the University by a professor it did not come from a corporate lab did not come from the National Labs it came from the university like here so when people talk to me about Oh what about the deal we National Labs I say they hadn't been anything Volta gave us the first battery here it is a stack of coins silver and zinc separated by cardboard soaked and brine with this invention he gave birth to a new device and a new field of science electrochemistry and in addition without any innovation hubs at any Silicon Valley mentor venture mentoring or any of this blah blah blah this within 10 years migrated off campus and gave birth to new industry electroplating and electoral forming and I submit to you in 1810 they were already here in London sir Humphrey Davy electoral forming and people tell me have you heard about 3d printing 3d printing they were doing it here in 1810 but you know the other thing that Voltas discovery did was for the first time I demonstrated the utility of a professor until Volta nobody imagined a professor could be of any use but voltage showed that if you give a professor resources to leave them alone I mean good students and so on he's liable to do something of societal value but and I I've always said this right but I was on my feet giving a talk like this and all of a sudden I was hit with this epiphany you know what this man did with this invention this is the beginning of the electrical age what do I mean by that before Volta the term electricity applied to what it applied to static electricity before Volta electricity was you could take a piece of amber and a piece of wool and rub the amber and build up static electricity and put a piece of straw on a cup of water and then by moving the amber you could redirect the straw which was absolutely fantastic in 1650 the concept of action at a distance the notion that you could move something with a physical contact that was the first time demonstrated by static electricity but that was it with this for the first time you have electrons in motion a battery is not a voltage device it is a current source electrons in motion only electrons in motion do work electrons are all you know we say the same thing about people I could say about the student oh he was a he was a fine young man full of potential all voltage no current all right so this thing with this thing for the first time you can perform electrical work and everything we see here everything we have today starts with this that's how powerful this invention was and you know Faraday here Faraday had to be a good electoral chemist otherwise he couldn't be a good physicist because the only way the physicists could generate current was with electrochemistry so if you were incompetent electrochemistry couldn't do any experiment and that was with this current going through a wire that they detected a magnetic field and then somebody said well if a moving electric current gives rise to a magnetic field then somebody said what would happen if we took a conductor and subjected it to a moving magnetic field and they discovered that it generated a current and that gives birth to the Dynamo and here we are but everything starts with this it's fantastic by the way that note that note I didn't scan this and Robert grabbed it the Internet I had this note in my pocket this is my note I don't know what happened to it now but I I did it I did a high very high definition scan of it and I'm proud to say that I just go and grab stuff off the internet you have to know the provenance of all this stuff anyways all right so what's the path forward for storage so first of all you have to confine your chemistry to earth abundant elements so here's a chart it shows the relative abundance of the elements in the Earth's crust as a function of atomic number and we see up here it's a semi logarithmic plot so you see up here the abundant elements there the low atomic numbers and you see down here the scarce elements they're typically the high atomic number and the mandate that I gave to my students was the difference between the abundant elements and the scarce elements is 1 billion times 1 billion times so I told them if we're gonna build a battery that's going to scale for grid level storage they are forbidden to go to the lower part of the periodic table I mean look at tellurium tellurium is about as earth abundant as gold I don't know why people work on cadmium telluride solar cells I don't care that they're more efficient there isn't enough to Laurium in the Earth's crust to scale the only reason he would work on those was would be to learn something fundamental but ultimately if you're not if you're talking about something that's going to change the energy landscape you better be working on something up here or else it's not going to scale look silicon is what we make our total we'll take X out of silicon is why it's the second most abundant element here it's crust that's why everybody here has one of these in his or her pocket if the semiconductor were made on a rhodium nobody would have one all right oh by the way I got to tell you because you you'll understand this you that expression connect-the-dots you know it's business school their business you know we're gonna connect the dots you really you're gonna connect the dots all right well let's look at this lithium is atomic number three beryllium is atomic number four this is from a government publication by the way why would you connect lithium to beryllium do you know of anything that has an atomic number of 3.4 even if you made a beryllium lithium alloy all of the lithium's are atomic number three and all of the beryllium are atomic number four what does this mean what's crazier that somebody drafted this or that somebody published it hasn't been taken down it's still out there this is from the US Department of Energy I called the Department of entropy but okay so I say if you want to make some dirt cheap you should make it out of dirt and preferably dirt that's locally sourced because it doesn't make sense to trade your dependence on imported petroleum for dependence on imported neodymium no instead of burning oil we're we're importing neodymium from China money's going out of the country either way and make it easy to manufacture design at the discovery stage has to be primitive and easy to build why do they call the Giga Factory it costs five Giga dollars five billion dollars to build that stupid battery plant in Nevada you know what I could build for five billion dollars two not one but two integrated steel works each producing two million tons of steel per year instead I get one battery plant that makes yesterday's lithium-ion cells that one eight six five O's and people say Wow does it ever cool so stupid all right so let's let's pose the right question look at look at the question I posed inventing a colossal cheap storage device I did not use the word battery if I use the word battery I start thinking about a right circular cylinder like the one that's powering this remote control here and I start thinking so how do I take those little 186 five O's and make them big enough to fill this room and give me some megawatt hours of storage I never did that I just said keep it conceptual and by the way disregard to conventional wisdom do not consult with the incumbents and that goes for anything I've never talked to any battery experts if I did they tell me all of my aspirations were foolish everything that could have been tried has been tried what I want to do won't work I looked outside the field i disregarded conventional wisdom so I look for inspiration outside the field my other area of research what I've been doing at MIT for the first twenty five years was working on electrolytic production of metal so I looked to an aluminium smelter here's a modern aluminium small it is from Canada that's Alouette in Quebec from left to right is probably about 25 meters and then from front to back is probably about two kilometres and this thing's bacon aluminum non-stop 24/7 it's probably 500 thousand amperes four volts there's a man you see a man in the corner there that gives you a sense of scale and this thing produces aluminium non-stop using huge quantities of electricity this was invented in 1886 by two men working independently Charles Martin Hall in the United States and Pauli woudl in France now they are a rules on the left and halls on the right they were both born in the same year and they both died in the same year and they met once 1911 when Hall was getting the Perkins medal from the American Chemical Society and it rule came from France and spoke in praise of Hall and they were fierce competitors but they respected each other they both patented and the patents crossed that the World Court crossed licensed and so on and so forth it's a remarkable story two guys working independently while they were both born in the same year so by my math they must have been the same age in 1886 so how old were they fifty two forty two thirty two twenty two yeah 22 to 22 year olds changed the world with this invention they turned an aluminium from a precious metal costing more than silver into a common structural material 22 anybody here over 22 what are you done huh what are you waiting for they go from dirt to metal for less than $1 per kilogram that's a modern miracle so I looked at this thing and I said man that thing goes from dirt to metal for a dollar a kilogram and this thing traffic's in huge amounts of electric current except it's a consumer of current I said if I can figure out how to teach this thing to store current at the end I'll have something that's big and cheap everybody else is trying to figure out how do I take this little stupid thing and make it big and I'm saying this thing's already big and it traffic's and current just teach it to storm you see it that's the different way to pose the question by analogy and there it is the liquid metal battery so it's got three liquid layers the top layer is a low density electropositive metal the first embodiment was magnesium on top and then the opposite that so that's a really good metal a really good electron donor and then I want to put it against a really bad metal but not a nonmetal because it has to be electronically conductive otherwise things get really messy so I want to have the best metal against the worst metal like gives me the voltage so the worst metal is down it's on a semi battle so I put antimony and and in between I got a molten salt electrolyte it's high temperature can't use aqueous but mercifully magnesium is insoluble in the salt and the salt is insoluble an animal that they stratify just like salad oil and vinegar only now you've got three layers so we can make a demo we can put salad oil vinegar and mercury you have three layers serve that up and I don't need any membranes no separators and so what happens is that on discharge the magnesium wants to alloy with the antimony but the magnesium is insoluble and the salt if a magnesium becomes magnesium ion the magnesium ion can go through the salt and then the electron goes through the external circuit where it does work and down here and recombine so the top layer gets thinner and the bottom layer gets deeper and then to charge we force current through and electrorefining back so the magnesium goes back to the top we restore the top layer purify the magnesium purify the salt purify the antimony return the battery to its pristine condition now as the current flows either on discharge or uncharged it generates heat and that's a threat in a lithium-ion battery here we take that threat and we turn it into a attribute we trap that heat so imagine four hours discharge generate the heat sits for eight hours at some point later in the day for hours charged eight hours rest with that kind of daily cycling you can keep this thing at temperature who did the work these are my students they're young they're graduate students undergraduate students postdocs almost all of them had no background in liquid metals molten salts or electrochemistry I brought in novices they're bright I mean they're MIT but they weren't steeped in the field I brought not the expert I brought the anti expert and a multinational she's from Spain Korea they're from China she's from France Trinidad you get this one french polynesia he's from Tahiti with a PhD from Paris in high-energy physics and then came to me Paul and David and I were both born in Toronto in different years and I hired a few token Americans as well so that's the team and I'm the only one it was really steeped in molten salts liquid metals and electrochemistry so I taught him how to think about the problem and then turn him loose and the first year was terrible I mean we were getting beat up by the sponsor for really poor progress but they learned failed and then second year better in the third year they'd worked miracles and my initial funding came from the French energy giant total and then we got first round funding from the arpa-e Division of the US Department of Energy and with that I was able to bankroll this group of twenty people for three years it was a fantastic time so here's a here's an example this is the kind of way of an early cell the top is to magnesium obviously it's frozen now at room temperature and then the salt and on the bottom is the antimony and this is Steve - who was the Secretary of Energy at the time visiting Jocelyn one of my students and he came down and autographed the globe bar so I know he was there on June 22nd 2012 and I showed you magnesium but there's a plurality of choices and so for the top layer it can be any of these electropositive metals and we've looked at various combinations of them and they all work they work beautifully and the bottom layer can be any combination of things like this and there's even other possibilities as well so it's a platform really we've tested over a thousand cells of many chemistry's what are we looking for different alloys different salts you say why don't I just go to the database the database is very spotty when it comes to liquid metals we know a lot about steel a lot about aluminium a little bit about copper magnesium but you look up even something like the phase diagram of an ammonia bismuth and you'll either find nothing or you'll find two phase diagrams that don't agree with each other so we had to go and measure all this stuff and this isn't just cook and look I mean we managed to get this paper published in nature and you don't need to be told what nature represents this is this is really tough and it launched the careers of the young people I'm gonna have tenure tenure means never having to say you're sorry I don't have to publish but I do why do I publish what to tell other people what I'm doing no reason I publish it's for the young people to launch their careers that's why I publish I don't care if I publish it all for me alright so that here's we got its earth-abundant elements self-assembly easy to manufacture the round trip efficiency pay attention here people if you read on the internet the people could they say I'm crazy this is all nonsense and can't possibly work that it's gonna burn it doesn't burn magnesium doesn't burn it burns us pyrophoric ribbon or in fine powder but have you ever been to a magnesium smelter I have they open up the top and they pour magnesium in air so don't tell me that magnesium burns people who say that they missed a day of school now the round trip efficiency 80% that's after allowing for the losses due to the heating now if you look at pumped hydro where you have a dam you pump up high and then store it and then let it fall down round trip efficiency on that is 70% now I'm not gonna say 80 is better than 70 I'm just going to say that this is comparable to pumped hydro and that's the number one form of energy storage at grid level so it's fine it's self eating at commercial scale immune to thermal runaway we what's the worst thing you can possibly do to this and we did it by accident it wasn't planned no animals were killed in the process somebody goofed and something fell into a cell it was an open cell inside a glove box and cause the magnesium to mix with the antimony so you get a giant exotherm and the temperature went up below the boiling point of anything in the cell below the melting point of the steel container so we knew then and there that you could shake these things all you want you cannot have anything give you trouble and thermal runaway and it's safe to ship even by air you can't ship lithium-ion batteries by air these things I called the Department of Transportation and I wanted to get a reading on this and they said what's the voltage at room temperature I said room temperature it's solid metal and solid salt there's no voltage it's said you can you can ship any way you want but this is the most important thing this is something that people don't ask the lithium-ion people capacity fade alright so let me show these are cells this is the percent at four and a half years of temperature the temperature for these cells is four hundred and seventy five degrees Celsius for seventy five Celsius five thousand deep depth cycles 100 percent charge to 100 percent depth of discharge five thousand times if you did that once a day that would be tantamount to thirteen years there it is 99 plus percent retention of capacity no fade I didn't make this up this isn't the one cell and they all others die they all do this with all of the chemistry's right nobody can do this so two of the fellows in that image they came to me said we want to start a company now I didn't I was not involved in startups prior to this because I'm a professor and I've valued being a really good professor right they said no no we got to start a company why because if we want to change the world we can't just file patents and write papers and hope that somebody takes a license on this they'll fail so that that hooked me I do want to change the world for the better I hope all right so that we all the catchy names were taken by 2010 so we gave them the name the liquid metal battery corporation terrible name boring but so what and then years later we changed the name to Ambree how do I get the name ambry I came upon that the fact that you know there's this company out of the Bay Area called Cisco Systems they make routers I found out that they were called Cisco Systems because they were based in San Francisco so I took a look at the word Cambridge and I said because I I invented the battery in Cambridge the other Cambridge Cambridge Massachusetts I know there's a Cambridge around here somewhere but whatever anyway so Series A funding came from Bill Gates now I'm Canadian I'm very polite I wouldn't go after Bill Gates bill came to me he did why because he too was watching my chemistry lectures online and so in the summer of 2009 I got an email from a woman who said she was his secretary he just stepped down as CEO of Microsoft and she said mr. gates is coming to Boston at the end of September he'd like to meet with you for 90 minutes would you have time well I ignored the email because I thought the students had hacked into my account and I said you're not gonna make a fool of me I'm not gonna answer that and then about ten days later she wrote again and said maybe you didn't see this but he really would like to meet you so I showed it to a few people and they said I think this is real so sy wrote back and then finally I said what's this all about anyways and then he wrote and the you know this is what I want to talk about and he came and we sat in my office that was I just a lectured three of my 9-month that day it was a Friday we sat in my office for an hour and a half and we talked about computers and in education distance learning he even made some comments about the camera work in 309 one he says you got to improve that camera work itself and then towards the end he says so what are you working on and I sketched out on a whiteboard this idea the liquid metal battery and he said you know it seems to me that the the fundamental approach to grid level storage ought to be intrinsically different from the approach to mobile storage and I said you're smart as I got it I said I got colleagues here that are trying to repurpose lithium-ion batteries or grid level storage and he said if this thing ever gets spun off a campus let me know I'd be willing to put some money into it and and so a year later two of my students went and visited him and he became our first investor and so I met Bill Gates not because I wrote an op-ed piece for The Wall Street Journal I met Bill Gates because I was teaching a big freshman chemistry class which all of my colleagues would kill to avoid because nobody wants to teach a big service class but I'd went there why because why teach 500 people when I could prefer forgive me why teach 50 people when I could be teaching 550 I went for maximum impact and then they couldn't fit everybody into the auditorium so then they had to record the lectures and then they by 2004 we could stream video over the Internet and next thing you know he's watching my lectures so you know I can't make this stuff up yeah all right and then totale matched him so totale sponsored the research on campus and to tell also invested in the company and that's how it began so this is what it looks like this we're out in Marlborough Massachusetts about 40 kilometers west of Boston even these cells are ten centimeter on edge and each cell is about 80 amp hours and then we're also looking at doing four times that so that would be twenty by twenty centimeters and that would give us more than four times because you don't have the boundaries up to 380 amp hours and now we've got starting this year at all form one cell 800 amp hours now this I put this on the same scale this is a three amp hour lithium ion this is what they make in the gigafactory it's the one age 65 oh it's 18 millimeters in diameter 65 millimeters the zero means that it's a cylinder yeah so that's in 18 650 now why is that important if I wanted to put one megawatt-hour on a 50 square meter footprint I would need almost a hundred thousand of those little cells so I don't care if I give them to you for free you still have to pot them connect them balance them and on and on and on and whereas we would need 1500 cells so 1500 cells is manageable a hundred thousand cells that's crazy how many do you know how many 18 650s are in a typical Tesla a thousand four thousand about eight thousand cells about eight thousand all right so this is what we're building right now this is we decided that the things should be able to be shipped along the road so that's going to make shipping container as the footprint so this is one quarter of a shipping container shipping container is forty feet long so this is ten feet and the cross section here is eight feet by eight feet so this is 18 cubic meters this will give us one megawatt hour thousand volts this thing weighs 15 tons very heavy the energy densities is poor compared to lithium-ion but this thing isn't supposed to move it doesn't matter don't pay for attributes you don't need besides I say that thing's so heavy no one can steal it so it's got its own anti-theft built in but the thing is it must be priced below without of lithium-ion and why is that important there's a term of art it's called premature lock-in it's what happens when a new technology comes into the market and there are different purveyors now I use you many of you are too young to remember when video cassette recorders came out there were four different formats and then it came down to two VHS and Betamax and B to Mac's was superior but VHS got the jump because it was a 2-hour cassette and beat'em axles of one hour Cosette why was that important because with a one-hour cassette you could watch two 30-minute sitcoms but with a two-hour cassette you could put an entire movie and no one anticipated the idea was that you would record programming from your television no one imagined the idea that you could take a license from the producer of a film copied onto video cassettes and so on and so on but anyways the VHS took over that's called premature lock-in well maybe we're going to see the same thing with lithium-ion now this chart was put together by Bloomberg New Energy Finance and what they did is they took the prices of lithium-ion from 2010 down to 2016 and they fit them to a semi-log plot and based on the coefficient they called it a 19 percent learning rate it's just the fit of the historical pricing all right it's largely driven by Chinese overcapacity it's not there's not learning but anyways and then these Barbie dolls look at what they do they take this curve and they extend it out to 2030 they took five six years and extend it out for another 14 years and announced then it'll be 73 dollars a kilowatt hour by 2030 meanwhile I'm trying to get this company off the ground so our investors come to me and say you guys are toast because you see we started with lithium lead antimony at which at scale would have got us to 270 dollars a kilowatt hour when lithium-ion was 1000 so we were beating lithium I and so badly it wasn't a joke but look what happened over time lithium-ion comes down so we pivoted and went to lithium bismuth why didn't we go to lithium bismuth first because business was too expensive but a new mine opened up in Vietnam in 2014 the price of bismuth dropped to half and now we jump to lithium business so now we're going to go to 170 but the lithium ion keeps coming by the way this is lithium ion price so price could be below cost to drive out competitors and these guys I say look are you talking about sells are you talking about batteries at scale and they don't know they don't know I'm being asked to compare my all-in battery at one megawatt-hour scale to this guys little flashlight battery it's really crazy but doesn't matter this is what drives decision-making so we pivoted again now we've got CEM see I can't tell you what it is just yet and CEM see on day one it's putting us at $75 a kilowatt hour and they'll never get to $75 a kilowatt out so that's where we are but it's been tough and what's our learning rate we're smarter than air Larry let me show you some other fashionable nonsense this is from California Independent System Operator somebody I do one of my colleagues actually presented this and it says grid storage spans three orders of magnitude in time scale three orders of magnitude two daily cycling weekly cycling monthly cycling yearly cycling do you really believe you're gonna put the capital into a battery that you're gonna use once a year what are they what's what are you doing with this and so there's this whole buzz right now about long duration storage what do you mean long duration like sunset to sunrise that's the long duration or maybe two or three days it's been raining haven't been able to get much solar energy but the notion you're gonna take it from July and save it until a day in December this is stupidity so what are they showing new long-duration cases monthly yearly seasonal you'll see this and if you people parody right up to the Department of Energy offices I'm saying what are you guys doing so what this shows is that if you were gonna have by the way so you you want to have the electricity after it goes in and out of your device contribute on the order of two or three cents a kilowatt hour let's say it cost you ten cents a kilowatt hour to generate it by Sun and you're going to store it and it now it comes back and as a result of being stored and coming back now the electricity cost you 25 cents a kilowatt-hour yes I don't what are you talking about you want to be able to generate it at 10 cents a kilowatt hour and for having stored it and then pulling it back out it adds maybe 2 cents a kilowatt hour so now it's 12 cents it's still solar it's still cheaper than what you would have God buy coal all right so if you pardon me if you want to do 2 cents a kilowatt hour and cycle it only once a year you're gonna have to build this battery at a capital cost of 20 cents 20 cents a kilowatt hour I bet this is crazy 20 cents a kilowatt hour what's what's crazier that they did they put it up or did somebody read it and now and I saw the video of this is a YouTube video and all these people are sitting there politely clapping well no one stood up and said what are you doing anyways so we're now trying to raise some money series c plus plus we need about 25 million dollars for the next two years and then get the final product out we cannot release a product that doesn't work if it fails prematurely we're dead and by the way the industry won't take anything you understand the Arrhenius equation and so on and so they don't know any of this stuff they say if I claim that I can go for so many cycles in so many years they want to see the data so many cycles in so many years so if I can make the claim that I've I can run this thing for five years without I gotta give them five years of data from the big thing man those are high standards all right so we've got two more years and then we're I think we're done you may have heard of this company GE so back around 2006 they came to MIT and I pitched a liquid metal battery idea to the vice president of research for entire GE he didn't react because they were already committed to dureth on dureth on is the old zebra sodium nickel chloride and after 10 years 1 billion dollars at one point they had 400 people working on they quit they failed why it's not cost-effective to manufacture the batteries at a competitive price point compared to other battery technologies which is to say when they started in 2006 lithium-ion was around twelve thirteen hundred dollars a kilowatt hour they figured they could make zebra for about 350 but by 2016 2015 lithium-ion was below that so they got cut off by lithium-ion burned if it GE with a billion dollars in ten years can't do it and I've got sixty five million dollars in seven years and we're still in the game watch us alright so what's next at MIT we're still looking at next generation chemistry's lower temperature higher voltage lower-cost that I'm now starting to think about cars because they're no lithium ions no good for cars either but it's not gonna be this one so this is this is zebra this is the one that failed for for GE so it's a liquid sodium contained in the cup of beta alumina and then on the other side you've got a molten salt electrolyte and then the positive electrode is nickel nickel chloride and the problem with this thing is that you've got this fragile brittle membrane because that thing has to be paper thin otherwise you're gonna have a big voltage drop across it but if it's paper thin it's going to be mechanically weak so this is the tension you want to make it thick to be strong and you want to make it thin to be non resistive and the nickel nickel chloride is a solid solid reaction the kinetics of that are terrible so what we did is we started working on this about two years ago and we came up with a different way to allow I call this chemistry a displacement chemistry because sodium goes with sodium and sodium chloride are running one reaction and nickel nickel chloride are running another reaction it's a displacement reaction so we figured out how to run a displacement reaction without a brittle membrane no ceramic membrane it's a metal mesh and it uses a different principle and this was fantastic it was a big surprise so now we could put not just sodium it has to be sodium in the in the zebra battery because only sodium is the ion that will transport through a bita aluminum but we can use lithium sodium magnesium calcium anything up there and then the molten salt and on the bottom we don't have to use nickel nickel chloride we can use lead antimony bismuth ten zinc and so there's a whole new set of opportunities this is different from liquid metal this is called liquid displacement battery it's the LMB is liquid metal battery LDB is liquid displacement battery when I first started typing LD be the spell checker kept putting LBD little black dress and I said no no no it's this is liquid displacement battery and I had to teach my dictionary that LD be in caps is is okay I'm not writing about dresses and this is gonna be higher voltage about three times the voltage okay so I see we're getting close to the end so I'm gonna jump over we're not gonna we're not gonna go through all of this other stuff just just I get too excited I prepared too much stuff so it's okay it's okay so now what we're going to do we're going to zip down to towards the end yeah yeah yeah let's Boston metal that's okay good good good now we go right here to the end because I want to make sure that I've got some virus on the machine okay it's all good I know my glasses on I can't see my wife to go up to here Oh what happened don't let don't let anybody over 30 touch a computer go to this yeah all right so I've shown you that this Odyssey with the liquid metal battery what do we learn we learn about the power contrarian thinking we learned that everybody says go to room temperature that's going to be most energy efficient and so on and so forth I said no no no I went to high temperature the high temperature gives you the fast electrode kinetics and fast is everything they said go with experts I said no no don't go with experts go with the anti experts I brought in the novices so these are these are the kinds of lessons that I learned from this experience and I invite you to to think about and the other one is about going global the Apple experience build everything in one factory in China and Foxconn then ship it all over the world I'm saying no these batteries are big they're heavy and they're based on earth abundant elements so instead batteries in Africa should be built in Africa by Africans using African resources that way they become authors of their own future batteries in India should be built in India batteries in North America should be built in North America that's very different have aligned interests so that's the that's the message that I'm giving you and see it's all liquid metal liquid metal is fantastic and the last piece that I'll say is that when I'm with the students I always give them the battlecry from Paris 1968 Hawaii where at least the mondale impossibly be realistic ask for the impossible and sometimes with enough ingenuity the impossible becomes the inevitable thank you okay so I think we've got time for a couple of questions if anyone's at the back yeah there's a microphone heading your way a high-speed hello first of all thank you very much for your talk I'd like to ask about the discharge capacity of yourselves because you've mentioned how it compares in terms of storage with lithium-ion you've also mentioned Pumped hydro storage energy but how does the discharge rate perform because if you want to use this into large-scale grid electricity storage it's just you need certain districts rate to be able to supply the energy fast right discharge rate the rate capability the rate capability is very high we can discharge these things at multiple C and the other thing is that they can take a lot of abuse too so you know you can get paid sometimes to actually accept electricity because sometimes the demand Falls supplies exceeding demand and the operator is looking for some place to dump electricity that's what they go to negative pricing they invite factories to turn on all the machinery and so on this thing you can force huge currents into it and if you could do it with lithium-ion but you damaged by the way if anybody's got a car with a lithium-ion battery use those high speed charging stations you can use them but they really shocked the the battery so you're taking the battery closer to death sooner but this thing we've done it and then gone back to normal cycling and no evidence of any damage so they go to multiple sees it's fine that that was one of the things that drove us to the all liquid that it could respond very quickly and it doesn't it doesn't suffer any damage you see within the lithium-ion battery you have solid part the positive electrode and over time you know when when the Lithia they expand and then when they deal at the 8th they shrink and if you do this a hundred times with a piece of ceramic eventually it fractures and then the one piece doesn't is no longer connected so that's how you you lose capacity I don't have any formula to you know to give you I've in this instance for me bring on novices was was a smart thing to do in retrospect I didn't know at the time but all I'm saying to you is that if you have a certain desire you want to make the world a better place you want to take on a certain challenge don't edit yourself don't say well I'm I was never any good at chemistry I can't possibly work on this no you might bring a fresh perspective you know so I don't have a I don't have an answer it's all visceral I don't have a plan people say what's your plan B I said I don't have a plan a if I had a plan a I wouldn't be here you know because everything would be all mapped out and I have to be able to to respond Wow the question is what happens if you use hydrometallurgy and put together things like lithium iron phosphate and so on and I think that for you know grid level storage I don't think it has the the the intensity well I did this solids don't like to undergo these these transitions I mean the good news is that you know John Goodenough who was at Oxford in 1985 made the discovery that lithium cobalt oxide would intercalate lithium ion that was a an important discovery but he never he never then wrote the prescription for batteries you know and and the fact that it undergoes this volumetric excursion that makes it problematic but we pressed on and here we are today now when you're going a grid level storage may not just look at the aluminum smelter look at the aluminum smelter you know that's 400 that's 500,000 amps at 4 volts you can't do that with solid you can't so but you know I don't want to negate anybody if they're people here are working on solid-state batteries and you make it successful I'll be the first to congratulate you but I'm just telling you from my perspective I just say high-temperature all liquid liquid metal molten salt thank you for your talk first of all I wanted to ask you if you think that a good scientist is also a good teacher now I know a lot of good scientists who are terrible teachers so yeah yeah but I think that I think that there's a the surprise for me the surprise for me is that that all of this stuff that I showed you today with the liquid metal battery than the liquid displacement battery and so on and so forth all of this was not from advanced chemistry I I my degree was in metallurgy I did not have a degree in chemistry so I didn't use density functional theory or computational did it at a none of that stuff no vasp none of that all that stuff is useless when it comes to liquids it can do vapor and it can do solids but it can't do liquids so how did I get to this I got to this because I was a metallurgist from University of Toronto and therefore I did not know any chemistry metallurgist historically don't know chemistry why because they're not taught chemistry why because it's it's it's purposeful the reason is that if you're a chemical metallurgist if you're going to make steel you know you start with iron oxide you reacted with carbon in the blast furnace and you make pig iron and so on if you're gonna make aluminium you start with aluminium oxide you dissolve it in cryolite and you pass current and then you make liquid aluminum so you want to make meanies and we start with magnesium chloride you electrolyze this on so every one of the metal production processes is prescribed based on the availability of the or of the feedstock so the first chemistry class that a metallurgist takes is thermodynamics Gibbs Ian's thermodynamics so now we say okay is this reaction going to go to the right or to the left and so on and so forth now today modern material science is a card blush so okay so you know how to use gibbsy in thermodynamics but what's the reaction you should be considering they don't know they don't know now I came to MIT and I was thrust into teaching as a assistant professor in this freshman chemistry class electronic structure and bonding I didn't know I had to teach myself I was about 12 hours ahead of the the students and I was just and I wasn't doing the lecturing I was just doing the the Q&A we had three lectures a week and - they call recitation sections it was basically Q&A so I was essentially a junior faculty acting as TA so I had to learn this stuff and then around 1993 I took over the lectures and that I had to master how how does a first-time learner who's 18 years old smart but hasn't seen this stuff before and that trajectory of trying to take this simple stuff and present it in a way and they they weren't gonna have any quantum mechanics they didn't have any math yet so we couldn't give them that so you had to teach electronic structure and bonding without resorting to mathematics and that clarified my thinking so I invented all of this I have a placemat on my desk it's just the periodic table laminated and I just looking at it and then just same with GC you want to get voltage you got to take something that's very electronegative and put it with something very electro positive and sort of looking at melting points and boiling points and so on so this is a case where the teaching drove the research you know so if you teach if all you do is lecture and your own little specialty subject and just talk about the papers that you've written you don't really challenge yourself but you step outside your comfort zone and you got to stand up you know the the lecture hall is one of the last it's it's it's so [Music] it's a it's it's it's high wire tightrope because anybody can ask a question and it's live it's like going to the theater only when you go to the theater you have to sit politely alright it's like going to the theater but you don't have to sit politely well you should be polite but you can ask questions and you're up there writing away and all of a sudden somebody asks a question you're going that's a good question I don't know the answer to that you see so the the the the lecture hall is is it's a fantastic place because everything is live there's no hiding and you know by the way when you get to question you've got to be honest because they know they know right away they they may not know the answer but they viscerally know whether I know the answer and if I don't know the answer I say I don't know the answer to that I'll check with some of my colleagues and I'll get back to you in the next class I come back and I give the answer as opposed to giving some evasive response and then everybody says don't bother asking questions the guy doesn't know and he's just gonna give you some BS and so don't don't bother that's that's the unvarnished honesty yeah and it sort of clarifies everything for you no more BS that's the methods to take her message thank you so much dawn for a fantastic talk I've never had so many laughs in electrochemistry talk before it's worth nothing thank you you

Channel: Energy Futures Lab

Views: 357,488

Rating: 4.859405 out of 5

Keywords: Energy Futures Lab, Imperial College London, Energy, Donald Sadoway, Liquid Metal Battery, Battery, Batteries, Energy Storage, Dyson School of Design Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT

Id: NiRrvxjrJ1U

Length: 64min 11sec (3851 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 18 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/logicwon]

Professor Donald Sadoway of MIT discusses the impact the liquid metal battery could have on the future of gridscale energy storage as well as the interesting story of how he arrived at the idea.

Massive-scale electricity storage would offer huge benefits to today’s grid, reducing price volatility, improving stability against loss of power, increasing utilization of generation assets by enabling us to design towards average demand instead of peak demand, and deferring the costs of upgrading existing transmission lines. The liquid metal battery offers colossal current capability and long service lifetime at very low cost, i.e., the price point of the electricity market.