Why Solid Carbon is the Future of Energy Storage

this is a block of graphite and it's got energy superpowers its incredible carbon structure means that it's strong enough to withstand tremendous heat but soft as a diamond is hard well according to the most hardness scale anyway I probably wouldn't want to sleep on it graphi is a form of solid carbon and has been powering pencils for centuries and now a similar form of solid carbon has delivered a massive breakthrough in renewable energy I spoke to solid carbon battery pioneers and Torah energy about their world first thermal energy storage system it charges blocks that are way bigger than this to insane temperatures so that it can deliver clean and continuous heat or electricity to fossil fuel hungry industries from the buildings we live in to the food we eat and the way we communicate almost everything we do relies on heavy industry burning fossil fuels to get round the-clock power and heat in degrees of thousands antor isn't the only company trying to solve these challenges using thermal batteries that store energy as heat rather than in chemical bonds but they found in solid carbon many magical properties that marked a breakthrough and this has incredible potential to create high performance long-lasting batteries with the power to run scorching hot industrial processes on cheap available renewable energy Anor was founded in 2018 by Stanford and MIT graduates determined to tackle climate change through their re SE Arch into thermal energy storage systems they became convinced that is not only possible but profitable for industrial processes to rely on Renewables I spoke to their co-founder Dr Justin Briggs to find out more about their mission to decarbonize heavy industry first we take renewable electricity could be wind could be solar could be geothermal and we use that electricity to resistively heat large blocks of solid carbon so you can think of this just like your toaster heating up a pie piece of toast except for we're doing it at much higher temperatures and we're doing it to to solid carbon so similar to um the the pencil lead the graphite inside your pencil uh these blocks of solid carbon are stored inside of an insulated container so imagine a shipping container sized unit and then the energy can be discharged as either process heat or electricity directly and tor's batteries sit at over 2000° C that's a third of the temperature of the surface of the Sun and hot enough to melt steel the temperatures that the battery can deliver are over 1, 1500° C which is precisely what processes like steel treatment glass making and advanced ceramic engineering need and up until recently have only been able to get from fossil fuels Justin explain to me why there's a difference between the temperature of the battery and the temperature that the battery delivers you need to be able to have a bunch of temperature Headroom above that temperature delivery point because otherwise you're not storing any energy so if you want to deliver energy at 1450 Celsius you can't have a Max operating temperature at 15 or 1600 Celsius because your delta T is so tiny you're just not storing much energy and that drives the cost through the roof so you really need to be able to go up to 18 19 2,000 or above to have a cost effective product at those temperatures now that are other amazing thermal energy Battery Systems out there from Sand batteries to concrete brick toasters which I've covered in a previous video but the Noto secret weapon that makes it possible for anor's Batteries to store and release Heat at such high temperatures is the solid carbon somewhat similar to the cheap lowgrade graphite in pencils antor can actually use a variety of grades of solid carbon to store heat including graphitized carbon and non-graphitized carbon low-grade graphite which still has a decent level of graphitization is what makes pencils possible this is because of its all important crystalline structure formed by stacking layers of graphine arranged in a hexagonal latice there are strong Cove valent Bonds in each layer but the layers themselves are weakly bonded together and slide over each other easily this is why graphite is used in lubricants it's also why pencil marks stick to paper layers of graphine are slipping off the so-called lead which has never actually been lead but that's a whole Story another unique property of graphite is that although each of its carbon atoms have four electrons they're only connected to three other carbon atoms the fourth delocalized electron can move freely which is brilliant for conducting electricity and heat and graphite has these in abundance subjected to extreme heat graphite gives off a thermal glow although heat conducts quickly through the graphite the heat transfer refer to the environment is primarily happening through the incredibly powerful radiation of light when you look at something like you know a rock material or a sand material or a concrete or any sort of fire brick the thermal conductivity is much lower and that means it's harder to push heat into the material and harder to pull heat out of the material so graphite has Stellar thermal conductivity relative to these other storage uh materials which dramatically simplifies the overall design of the system and allows us to use simpler heat introduction and heat extraction mechanisms pioneering the use of solid carbon is what sets an taus thermal battery apart three magical properties of thermal stability High thermal conductivity and high specific heat capacity allow a relatively small modularly packed product to deliver continuous and reliable heat and electricity on an industrial scale industrial processes like steel concrete cement and Ceramics are all around us as a single category heavy industry is responsible for more emissions than transport and has received much less attention in the Quest for zero carbon unlike things such as flying around in private jets network communications and renewable energy infrastructure are not luxuries we can't just simply reduce our Reliance on them one article I read it said that's just because we don't know how to do it so heavy industry continues to power through 40% of energy produced globally to me two reasons seem to stand out of why it seems to be impossible to decarbonize heavy industry firstly the processes demand very reliable Heat at very high temperatures 24 hours a day 365 days a year and until now this requirement for a constant supply of heat or power has required fossil fuels the intermittent supply of energy from Renewables just isn't reliable enough and storage has been prohibitively expensive secondly they Capital intensive Industries whose expensive assets have long lives so Nimble clean replacement technologies that transport has been able to put in place aren't an option up until recently this has seemed like a problem without a solution but the solid carbon battery has real potential to change this so let's take a closer look at how it works inside the entor battery but first I really need to put this down there are literally layers of graphine getting everywhere but thankfully I actually printed a stand using today's sponsor onshape I'm really excited to be working with onshape again because I absolutely love their product and I think that you will too on shape is a professional grade computer AED design software that is completely free for all makers and hobbyists forever it's even free for engineers and companies for 6 months so they can properly try it out here's the crazy thing in 2 minutes you can literally go and start making whatever you can think of without downloading anything all within the browser just like I did with this little stand because on shape is built with a cloud native architecture it enables features such as real-time collaboration seamless integration with mobile and tablet use for IOS and Android and built-in product data management cloud-based Autos saving also means you never have to worry about that horrible feeling where you design something and then the computer crashes and you lose all of your work file sharing can also be as simple as just sending a link in fact I've actually shared a file down in the description for the cad of a plane engine that you can go and check out on shape is also continuously adding new features so make sure to get a free account and start creating whatever you can think of using on shape. prozero which is also linked down in the description now let's see how this is you know what that's not too bad now back to antor there are basically three parts of their system charging storing and releasing the way anor's thermal battery charges is by electricity from Renewables resistively heating the carbon blocks think of the solid carbon as bread toasting in a toaster except it won't burn as it gets hotter it just keeps on getting more energy dense as more and more heat fits into the same space because solid carbon blocks can remain stable at temperatures up to 3000° c a lot of energy can be stored extremely effectively in batteries about the size of shipping containers just in case you're wondering not only are they very well insulated but also covered with a layer of Steel so that the Searing temperatures inside can be safely handled because of the insulation the thermal batteries are able to hold their heat for days but what about releasing or delivering this energy because of the high temperatures above 1, 1500° C well over 90% of heat transfer is accomplished via that thermal glow we saw earlier radiation or the light from the hot carbon moves the heat it's incredibly simple and antorus developed a genius mechanism to direct this heat to where it's needed one way we like to think about this is like an industrial decarbonization flashlight and basically you've got this this these hot glowing blocks contained and you just need to sort of open a shutter or open a door to release that thermal glow and you can then deliver that thermal glow directly to a processed fluid to you know like like steam or thermal oil that's being used at an IND industrial facility already but that is just for delivering heat anor's battery can also deliver electricity anor's second not so secret weapon is a therof photovoltaic panel that converts heat to electricity by shining the flashlights intense beam of radiant light into a special photovoltaic panel the infrared radiation of the thermal glow is converted into electricity it's just like a solar panel just using infrared radiation instead of the visible light from sunlight so instead of a regular PV panel this is a tpv panel makes sense antor now runs the world's largest production line of these tpv cells enabling heat to power conversion with no moving Parts through intensive research and development they've raised thermophotovoltaic efficiency to over 40% this may sound a little low but it's actually incredibly impressive compared to the roughly 20% efficiency of standard panels on many rooftops what makes this possible is all about maxing out the available photons that thermal glow coming off the hot carbon it's a very Broadband source of light that means there's there's photons with all different energies being emitted from that hot carbon many of those photons do not have enough energy to create an electron whole pair in the semiconductor that is the photo voltaic device and those photons are typically just lost or wasted in a solar PV application that those low energy photons lead to inefficiencies and actually set a theoretical upper limit on the physical efficiency you can achieve from that device which is about 33% for a solal single Junction solar PV device in our case those low energy photons still can't be used directly in the semiconductor because it's the same type of semiconductors that they use in solar PD but we can put a mirror on the back of the device which allows us to reflect those low energy photons back to the source where they can be reabsorbed so they typically pass right through the semiconductor because they can't be absorbed they hit our mirror they go back through the semiconductor come out the front of the semiconductor and then are reabsorbed in the carbon thereby keeping its temperature elevated and allowing the chance for another higher energy Photon to be emitted that can then generate electricity I honestly think this idea of a mirroring surface is so smart however this idea of giving a photon a Second Chance wouldn't really work with normal solar PV because as it comes down if you reflect Ed it back it would just go into the atmosphere and you'd never be able to get it again because there's no thermal battery to shoot it back into the interconnected advantages of the solid carbon battery are so many it's hard to summarize them without just sounding like an advert it uses cheap and abundantly available materials with existing Supply chains to create energy dense modular and easy to transport batteries that deliver reliable and Powerful clean energy to existing industrial assets and processors this not only lowers carbon emissions but also reduces operating costs largely because it uses excess renewable energy most days in the middle of the day in California energy is free electricity on the wholesale Market is worth 0 sometimes even negative dollars because there's so much solar that's now been installed in California the reason electricity sometimes can't be given away free is because the if supply and demand are not perfectly balanced surges can shut down the whole grid if wind turbines on a windy night are generating more electricity than the people need to use because they're all asleep then that is excess and because of the booming renewable energy sector there often is this excess available and storing all of our excess renewable energy in currently available lithium iron batteries isn't that sustainable this is because they require rare metals and minerals that are often difficult and destructive to mine expensive to produce and have a relatively short lifespan so thermal batteries are a real game changer for electricity storage the reason they can be so great goes beyond their actual efficiency which to be honest if you compare it just like for like to lithium ion batteries doesn't look that great in a lithium ion battery the round trip efficiency of electricity being converted to a chemical bond and back into electricity is between 90 and 95% with resistive heating thermal energy storage converts 99% of the electricity it re receives into heat and releases between 90 and 95% of it as heat again so far so good but the roundtrip efficiency when you turn the heat back into electricity goes down to about 30 to 40% however you have to take other factors into consideration when you're storing energy that would otherwise be wasted and cheaply using abundant materials already in mass production it puts the whole question of efficiency into a different light especially if you're buying the electricity for next to nothing and discharging it when it's extremely high value and then there's lifespan it's hard to directly compare but the average lifespan of lithium iron batteries in Grid energy storage is around 4 to 6 years according to antor their heat batteries will be able to be used for 30 years or more without degradation this hasn't been fully tested yet but there are thermal battery installations at manufacturing facilities in California that have been operating for 15 years with minimal capacity degradation according to a post from anor's CEO Andrew ponic the combination of low raw material costs high heat capacity and a massive thermal temperature swing result in the carbon storage medium coming in as low as $1 per KW the low material costs are a big one here which they say are about 15 times lower than molten salts and 50 times lower than lithium ion batteries it is worth noting here that these are just the material costs though rather than the levelized cost of storage though when everything is taken into account the overall cost of the system will still be an order of magnitude cheaper than the lithium ion batteries they replace when deployed at scale and when we started the company a few years ago the space was pretty much empty and in the last several years a bunch of different companies have cropped up using different storage architectures different storage materials which is great it's a sign that people are you know realizing that this is a really exciting way to actually do decarbonization of heavy industry that to me is what makes this such a promising technology for industry and with 2023 being declared the hottest year on record by 0.15 De finding ways to reduce emissions in practical costeffective ways has never been more important as you're still watching please subscribe to the channel as I think you'll like some of the other videos I make here 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Channel: Ziroth

Views: 270,746

Keywords: Science, Engineering, STEM, Electric, Zero, Tesla, News, Research, EV, Battery

Id: cwDly9pjSJg

Length: 17min 39sec (1059 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 22 2024