The Missing Link in Renewables

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it would open portals to new dimensions but that again is not going to happen anytime soon no if i was to pick one technology that would have the biggest impact on our society today that is within grasp it would be cheap scalable energy storage for the grid the electricity grid works nearly entirely on a just-in-time manufacturing method we generate the electricity just as it's needed there is no warehouse of electricity that we can dip into pumped hydroelectricity does provide some storage and is a nearly centuries-old technology but it's not scalable to our current needs lithium-ion batteries are our best option right now they have proven their worth in the hornsdale power reserve in australia it was commissioned primarily as a fast frequency response service this means it can act as both the load when the frequency of the grid gets too high or as a power source when the frequency of the grid gets too low kind of how a flywheel maintains the rotational speed of an engine you see our grids are designed to operate on a particular alternating current frequency if the grid deviates from that frequency it can cause all kinds of issues that generally just result in protective measures being activated to protect the infrastructure and ultimately cuts power to its users a blackout south australia was struggling with these blackouts in 2016 tornadoes ripped through south australia and damaged some power lines this caused the voltage and frequency of the grid to deviate from its baseline this caused the wind turbines to trip their protective measures and lower output now this was a massive problem because this is what south australia's power generation looked like on that day with nearly 50 percent of their power coming from wind to deal with the sudden decrease in output in wind the interconnector to victoria attempted to increase its power transfer but rather quickly shut itself down to prevent the line frying itself the grid basically did the technological equivalent of a human passing out when they see a drop of blood a chain reaction of panic leaving 850 000 people without power in response the australian energy regulator is trying to sue the wind companies it had approved for not doing a job they were not capable of doing in frequency regulation i feel like they only have themselves to blame south australia had built far more wind power than its grid could reliably handle it lacked the necessary interconnections to neighboring grids and energy storage facilities like pumped hydro batteries or simply reserve power natural gas plants it was a poorly planned grid instability was inevitable we are thankfully learning from these mistakes but as renewables grow the challenge of preventing blackouts like this is only going to grow we won't just need fast frequency response but we will also need load shifting where we have enough storage to charge batteries when renewables are available and discharge them when it isn't this is going to be expensive lithium ion batteries are the cheapest we have right now but when it comes down to it they weren't designed for this job they are designed to be light and energy dense for portable electronics but for a stationary battery that's a pretty useless trace to have it's like having an underwater hair dryer just doesn't make sense lithium-ion batteries are the cheapest form of energy storage available because their mass-market adoption has allowed for the economies of scale to reduce their price but what if we designed a new type of battery a battery that was designed from the ground up specifically for the grid to learn more about this i spoke with donald sadaway a renowned professor of materials chemistry at mit and founder of liquid metal battery company ambry the last thing i do is seek the advice of the incumbents the incumbents are threatened by by in radical innovation you realize that the lithium-ion battery did not come from the battery industry the battery industry refused even manufacture the lithium-ion battery so sony sony wanted a better battery to power their handheld device and this is 1990 and sony goes to all of the big battery producers in japan and they go and they say here's the here's the formulation build this and here's a purchase order for pick a number some tens of millions of dollars and each and every uh japanese battery manufacturer said no my building we have all of this capital investment in the manufacture of nickel metal hydride batteries we can't build this battery in that plant and so they said no but somebody at some point said you know if we want to have lithium-ion batteries for our appliances there's only one way we're going to have we're going to build them ourselves and so sony says what had a battery company it says we need batteries and there's only one way we're going to get them we're going to build them ourselves and so sony built the first lithium-ion battery manufacturing facility and very soon thereafter they were getting inquiries from people who are building mobile phones saying can we have those and then people who are building mobile computers laptop computers can we have those and by 1995 nickel metal hybrid was pretty much displaced so what battery chemistry is professor saturay trying to build and can it have the same revolutionizing disruptive effect on grid storage that lithium-ion batteries had for consumer electronics the idea started simply professor saturay had decades of experience in electrolysis for the refinement of metals like iron and aluminium that process takes a lot of energy to refine the metal so why not try to make that process reversible and allow the reverse reaction to give electricity back this is the basic concept of liquid metal batteries we alloy and de-alloy metals in a perfectly reversible reaction they don't need to be light they need to be cheap and as professor sataway says i say if you want to make something dirt cheap make it out of dirt so how do we go about choosing materials for a battery like this what does the design ideation phase look like professor sataway is a professor of materials chemistry at mit looking at a periodic table is a different experience for him this is what he sees when picking materials for a technology like this for the liquid metal battery we first need to refine our search down to metals and metalloids which are these elements next we need to maximize the difference in electronegativity to maximize our voltage in general electronegativity is highest on the top right of the periodic table and lowest on the lower left so our electrode materials can be further narrowed down to elements in these two groups next as professor sataway said if we want our battery to be dirt cheap we have to make it out of dirt so let's plot our relative abundance of elements of the candidate elements for our negative electrode calcium is by far the most common which is the negative electrode of the ambry liquid metal battery however they didn't arrive at their current electrode materials just by analyzing the periodic table experimentation was vital as this is a complex and dynamic system they have tested several combinations of different electrode materials from these two groups and there are a lot of complicated interactions to consider ambry has landed on a calcium antimony cell chemistry so how does it work these materials are placed into a ceramic insulated cell together when a current is applied the materials begin to heat up and eventually they will turn to liquid and the metals will separate naturally as a result of their density differences the heavier positive electrode sinks to the bottom with a neutral density electrolyte separating the lower density negative electrode on top this makes building the cell very simple lithium ion batteries use complicated coating processes to build their electrodes this is the charged state now when a load is applied the opposite electric current is experienced this causes the calcium electrode to break into a calcium cache ion and two electrons the cache ion travels across the electrolyte bridge and combines with the antimony and the electrons that have traveled on the external circuit to form a new alloy this continues to happen until the calcium electrode is completely consumed now we just have the new mixed alloy and the electrolyte this is the discharge state to get back to the charge state we simply apply the opposite current and the reverse reaction occurs and creates a fresh battery now this brings another advantage lithium-ion batteries degrade over time as they are charged and discharged chemical reactions occur that damage the electrodes and reduce their ability to hold a charge and many of the ways we need load shifting batteries to operate are the exact ways that accelerate this degradation over time taking a lithium ion battery from full to zero charge is particularly damaging as few as 500 deep cycles can reduce the capacity of the nca batteries that tesla uses by as much as 20 that represents about a year and four months of daily use for our load shifting batteries whose job will be a daily one however lfp batteries which tesla has started using in its chinese model 3s degrade much slower even under deep cycling and they have stated that they will use lfp batteries for stationary storage in the future depending on the temperature they operate at lfp batteries drop to 85 to 95 percent capacity after 3 000 cycles higher temperatures result in higher capacity drop however ambry have shown that their capacity fade is minimal even after 5 000 cycles thanks to the continual creation and destruction of its electrodes allowing us to fully discharge our batteries on a daily basis for upwards of 20 years however as i'm sure you have been wondering keeping the calcium and antimony electrodes so hot that they melt comes with disadvantages for one we are going to lose some of our electricity to heating the materials up to operational temperature this reduces our round trip efficiency so to explain it if you put 100 units of electricity in there are some losses because there's some joule heating and so on and so forth with liquid metal battery it's about 80 percent because the the difference the 20 is the energy loss desirably to heat the battery to keep it at temperature so you say wow 80 that's 20 percent loss what's up with that the round-trip efficiency of pump hydro is 70 so we're better than pumped hydro but the the thing is that this is a case of don't don't answer irrelevant questions because the the key question is what is the the cost of electricity so this is where things get a little complicated luckily we have an equation to calculate the levelized cost of electricity storage it's determined by the total costs which are the sum of the initial capital costs the continual operation and maintenance cost the cost of charging and the end of life costs divided by the total electricity discharged based on ambry's calcium antimony cell chemistry the cost of electrode materials vastly undercuts current generation lithium-ion batteries with the total cost of the liquid metal battery electrode materials coming in at 17 per kilowatt hour versus 51.2 dollars per kilowatt hour for the most common nickel manganese cobalt batteries if they manage to get the initial capital cost down 66 percent that decrease in round-trip efficiency is a minor concern these continual costs are hard to predict operations and maintenance costs for lithium-ion batteries could include buying more batteries to bring total capacity back in line as the batteries fade we also have very little data for end-of-life costs which will primarily be determined by how easily disposed of or recyclable the batteries are for both of these metrics liquid metal batteries will likely have an advantage however even with the promise of liquid metal batteries lithium ion batteries have a major leg up on any potential competitor they have had decades to work on the manufacturing process and reduce their price and they are still getting cheaper ambry have proven the cell chemistry works on the bench scale but actually bringing a product to market is much harder than proving the science works it's it's simply the the long journey from lab bench to marketplace we you know uh here at mit i with my team of students and postdocs we worked on this i had a concept and and then we reduced it to practice and then got it to the point where we said it's time to start a company now how do you take that and turn it into a marketable product that is uh able to be manufactured you know at the university you know you make five cells and one of them works and and you get a publication out of it and everybody's high-fiving and so on but but in manufacturing you have to have everything has to work so so we had to design the manufacturing process and there's nobody to turn to there's no there's no model i can take the most brilliant the most competent people in the lithium ion battery sector and almost everything that they know is inapplicable because they're the lithium-ion chemistry is different which means that the format of the battery is different their needs are different i mean they have to guard against thermal rise we have to guard against thermal fall we want to keep our batteries hot they're trying to prevent their batteries from getting hot there are dielectric hermetic seals that have to survive 500 600 celsius so obviously they're going to have to be ceramics but ceramics are brittle fragile and they don't like thermal excursions but we have to be able to to endure thermal excursions and i can give you a ceramic you can do it like that but it's going to cost something around a nasa price point designing an entirely novel product is not easy those dielectric hermetic seals in particular are a tricky bit of engineering they need to be dielectric to separate the positive and negative electrodes they need to form a seal to prevent gases and moisture from entering the battery and causing corrosion and secondary reactions it needs to be corrosive resistant as those molten salt electrolytes can corrode many materials and to boot it needs to be heat resistant since the battery operates at 500 degrees celsius those are four very specific combinations of material properties that don't come with an off-the-shelf rubber o-ring it's one thing to design a prototype that works but it's an entirely different beast to design a product that can be manufactured cost effectively and reliably when lithium-ion batteries first came to market in the 90s their price per kilowatt hour was upwards of three thousand dollars but over the past three decades that price has continually dropped to about 150 dollars per kilowatt hour there is no scenario where ambery comes out of the gates at this price point no matter how cheap their electrode materials are the price of a novel manufacturing method will offset any cost savings until the economies of scale take over this difficulty of bringing a new technology to market despite the obvious potential advantages is called technological lock-in and it makes it incredibly difficult for newcomers to enter the market if they can't compete with the cost straight out of the gate they are going to struggle to find buyers in order for new products like this to get to market and start their journey to affordability they often need to find a niche market where their advantages outweigh their costs so where could liquid metal batteries find this niche market as we explained lithium-ion batteries are temperature sensitive without proper thermal management lithium-ion batteries will at best degrade faster but they can also malfunction or even catch fire this has already happened with a large-scale lithium-ion battery in arizona where battery degradation led to a thermal runaway in other words a rack of batteries failed and caught fire leading to the shutdown of every battery storage facility in the state until the cause of the problem was found these disadvantages of lithium-ion batteries are exactly what is going to open the door for liquid metal batteries the liquid metal battery can work just fine in extreme conditions after all the entire product is designed to operate at 500 degrees no cold or warm environment is going to interfere with its operation making the battery better suited for hot weather climates in an application where the batteries need to operate in a warm climate while being used daily and under deep cycling liquid metal batteries may be able to justify their initial high price point for the right early adopter and that's exactly what has happened terascale is a data center company that is building a scalable data center that will operate on its own renewable micro grid in the warm desert climate of reno nevada it has already built 23 megawatts of geothermal and 10 megawatts of solar as part of their phase 1 20 megawatt data center this will be attractive to companies wanting to use green energy to run their servers and companies that want to shield their data from potential power outages or even cyber attacks through grid vulnerabilities which have become increasingly common over the last decade this microgrid will shield terrascale's customers data from such vulnerabilities but to run on renewables reliably they are going to need a lot of energy storage and for that they have turned to ambry announcing very recently that they will partner with them for a massive 250 megawatt hour battery that will begin construction in 2021 enough storage to run the 20 megawatt data center for 12 and a half hours strays this will be an excellent test of the technology and i for one will be following us closely because if it succeeds it's going to revolutionize how our grids operate forming that missing link of renewables we spoke with professor satterway in far greater detail about his work with liquid metal batteries but it's difficult to squeeze all that detail into a youtube video that's why we started modulus a podcast hosted by me and stephanie from real science a podcast where we will dive into the people behind the scientific stories we tell here on youtube we will talk to the scientists who are on the cutting edge of research and by the people who are affected by the topics we discuss we learn what it's like watching your life's work descend onto the martian surface with babak for dowsie we get inside information with people like professor sataway pioneering revolutionary technology this podcast will show the real-life people behind these topics and the real-life impact these scientific stories have on the world the first episode of modulus launched on nebula today the streaming platform made by me and several other educational youtube content creators it's the place to watch our videos and podcasts ad free along with original content that is not available anywhere else like my logistics of d-day series or tom scott's game show money we can take more risks on nebula where we don't have to worry about the youtube algorithm there is so much original content there with more being added all the time and to make it even better nebula has partnered with curiosity curiositystream the streaming platform with thousands of high budget high quality documentaries like this one called the secret world of lego that gives an inside look into the world of lego's headquarters in denmark if you've hesitated before to get curiosity stream and nebula and never quite pull the trigger now is definitely the time to do it for a limited time a yearly subscription to the bundle deal is on sale for just 11.79 per year that's less than a dollar per month signing up is also the best way to support this channel and all of your favorite educational content creators thanks for watching and if you'd like to see more from me the links to my instagram twitter and patreon are below you

Channel: Real Engineering

Views: 1,056,880

Rating: 4.9393878 out of 5

Keywords: engineering, science, technology, education, history, real

Id: -PL32ea0MqM

Length: 23min 26sec (1406 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 30 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/mean11while]

I was braced for a company to claim its new battery technology ran on 100% pure renewable human thought.

[u/dansin]

The concept of liquid mental melts my brain.

[u/WalkIntoTheLite]

Interesting. But their requirement to keep the metal molten at all times, seems like a huge downside. When not actively being used, they're still leaking out a huge amount of heat, leading to really high inefficiency.