Batteries & Energy Storage news and discussions

[wjfox]

Big batteries charge on to centre stage with new tricks for the grid

9 May 2023

The total capacity of big battery storage in Australia’s main grid has gone past one gigawatt with the recent addition of two new big batteries at Torrens Island and Hazelwood, but that number is expected to double and then treble in coming years.

The Torrens Island and Hazelwood batteries are not the biggest batteries to be added to the National Electricity Market, but in some ways they are significant because they are the first to be built at the site of flagship fossil fuel centres.

Torrens Island is where AGL has built its massive gas generation plants in South Australia, which it plans to transform into a clean energy hub, and Hazelwood was the site of the country’s dirtiest coal generator that was closed rapidly by French energy giant Engie.

[...]

Both these big batteries have begun their commissioning process with just one hour of storage, because they are focused largely on the grid services market – Torrens is the biggest battery in the world with grid forming inverter technology.

But both are likely to grow – to two, four or even more hours of storage – as the market for batteries and time shifting wind and solar expands. And this is where battery storage gets interesting, because developers and owners are starting to unlock more of the big stack of services that big batteries can bring to the grid.

https://reneweconomy.com.au/big-batteri ... -the-grid/



Image: Victoria Big Battery. Credit: Neoen

[wjfox]

Largest UK battery energy storage facility comes online

May 11, 2023

TagEnergy and Harmony Energy have completed construction on the UK’s largest battery storage facility with a capacity of 99MWh. The $38m (£30m) development has a throughput of 49.5MW and lies near Luton, in the southeast of the UK.

International bank Santander UK have also given a $15.7m (£12.5m) funding package for the development. Construction began in March 2022, with renewable energy company RES acting as asset manager.

The development, known as Chapel Farm, uses a system of Tesla Megapack lithium-ion batteries in addition to Tesla’s Autobidder AI software.

Since entering the market in 2021, TagEnergy has built a portfolio of close to 4GW across Australia, France, Portugal, Spain and the UK.

TagEnergy’s first live facility is located in Dorset, in the south-west of the UK, with a throughput of 20MW. According to Franck Woitiez, chief executive officer of TagEnergy: “With more than double the operational capacity of our first live facility, Chapel Farm will provide a significant clean energy boost to the national grid and help grow renewables’ share of it”.

https://www.power-technology.com/news/l ... es-online/



Credit: Tag Energy

[weatheriscool]

New priming method improves battery life and efficiency
https://techxplore.com/news/2023-05-pri ... iency.html
by Silvia Cernea Clark, Rice University

Silicon anode batteries have the potential to revolutionize energy storage capabilities, which is key to meeting climate goals and unlocking the full potential of electric vehicles.

However, the irreversible depletion of lithium ions in silicon anodes puts a major constraint on the development of next-generation lithium-ion batteries.

Scientists at Rice University's George R. Brown School of Engineering have developed a readily scalable method to optimize prelithiation, a process that helps mitigate lithium loss and improves battery life cycles by coating silicon anodes with stabilized lithium metal particles (SLMPs).

The Rice lab of chemical and biomolecular engineer Sibani Lisa Biswal found that spray-coating the anodes with a mixture of the particles and a surfactant improves battery life by 22% to 44%. Battery cells with a greater amount of the coating initially achieved a higher stability and cycle life. However, there was a drawback: When cycled at full capacity, a larger amount of the particle coating led to more lithium trapping, causing the battery to fade more rapidly in subsequent cycles.

[weatheriscool]

Tesla Megapacks Are About 30% of the Global Battery Energy Storage Market
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2023/05/t ... arket.html
May 22, 2023 by Brian Wang

April was another strong month for the grid BESS market, with over 4GWh on new capacity entering operation across over 44 projects, a y-o-y increase of 75% compared to April 2022. For the full year 2023, a further 123GWh of capacity is planned to enter operation. In terms of new capacity announcements, over 27GWh was announced, across 11 locations. Tesla deployed 3,889 MWh of energy storage in the first quarter of 2023. Tesla likely deployed 5.5-6 GWh of the global 17 GWh energy storage market for 2023.

Rhomotion’s projection of ~250 GWh of global BESS (Battery Energy Storage System) production by 2025 proves accurate, that would mean $TSLA would have ~1/3 of the entire market. Tesla will be ramping the Lathrop and Shanghai megapack factories to 80 GWh/year.

[caltrek]

Can New Batteries Eliminate the Need for Cobalt Mined by Kids?
by Lucas Van Wyk
June 14, 2023

Introduction:

(Futurity) Scientists have developed a long-lasting battery made with nickel.

The discovery could reduce or even eliminate the use of cobalt in the batteries that power electric cars and other products.

Cobalt is often mined using child labor.

“Nickel doesn’t have child labor issues,” says Huolin Xin, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Irvine.

The method could usher in a new, less controversial generation of lithium-ion batteries.

Read more here: https://www.futurity.org/batteries-nic ... 933582-2

[weatheriscool]

Chinese scientists push lithium batteries up to a record 711 Wh/kg
By Loz Blain
June 19, 2023
https://newatlas.com/energy/highest-den ... m-battery/

Tesla's 4680 cells, for comparison, measure somewhere between 244-296 Wh/kg. So the extreme-density cells recently tested in Beijing represent a huge leap forward from the status quo – even if they're solely focused on maximizing a single metric.

The current cells, frankly, are good enough for most electric car use cases. But in other areas – such as high-powered mobile devices, high-performance electric motorcycles, and above all, electric aircraft and eVTOLs – manufacturers are crying out for batteries that can pack more energy into significantly less weight.

There are some pretty impressive new cells beginning to trickle onto the market – CATL's 500 Wh/kg "condensed battery," for one. But in terms of single-purpose cells designed purely to max out specific energy, the previous highest figure ever reported was a 575 Wh/kg anode-free pouch cell tested by Dalhousie University professor Jeff Dahn and his team.

This has now been smashed by a team from the Institute of Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. A small team developed a rechargeable 10-Ah pouch cell using an ultra-thin lithium metal anode, and a lithium-rich, manganese oxide-based cathode.

The team expanded the charge/discharge voltage range, and studied the structural stability of the cathode, as well as how modifications to the surface of the lithium anode affected the way in which lithium ions deposit onto the electrode and dissolve away from it as the battery charges and discharges.

[weatheriscool]

[weatheriscool]

New aluminum radical battery promises more sustainable power
https://techxplore.com/news/2023-07-alu ... power.html
by Flinders University

Scientists in Australia and China are hoping to make the world's first safe and efficient non-toxic aqueous aluminum radical battery.

Teams from Flinders University in South Australia and Zhejiang Sci-Tech University in China have reported the first stage of developing these novel batteries in an article entitled, Lewis Acid-Induced Reversible Disproportionation of TEMPO Enables Aqueous Aluminum Radical Batteries, published by the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Most batteries contain hazardous materials and can pollute the environment when disposed of in landfills or when thrown out elsewhere. Materials like lead, cadmium and mercury can poison people and animals and contaminate soils and water, and they stay in the environment for a long time.

Dr. Kai Zhang, from Zhejiang Sci-Tech University, and Associate Professor Zhongfan Jia's research lab at Flinders University collaborated on the (electro)chemistry of stable radicals in the most-used Lewis acid electrolyte (Al(OTf)3 and battery test.

[wjfox]

[DouglasTheKing]

I remember my school project about batteries and their impact on the environment. It was an assignment for my chemistry lesson. Fortunately, [spam link removed] was the site that saved me time. That chemistry homework help I got from experts made me get an A from my teacher and reliable knowledge that I implement now in my project about protecting the environment:)

[weatheriscool]

Next-generation flow battery design sets records
https://techxplore.com/news/2023-07-nex ... ttery.html
by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

A common food and medicine additive has shown it can boost the capacity and longevity of a next-generation flow battery design in a record-setting experiment.

A research team from the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory reports that the flow battery, a design optimized for electrical grid energy storage, maintained its capacity to store and release energy for more than a year of continuous charge and discharge.

The study, just published in the journal Joule, details the first use of a dissolved simple sugar called β-cyclodextrin, a derivative of starch, to boost battery longevity and capacity. In a series of experiments, the scientists optimized the ratio of chemicals in the system until it achieved 60 percent more peak power.

Then, they cycled the battery over and over for more than a year, only stopping the experiment when the plastic tubing failed. During all that time, the flow battery barely lost any of its activity to recharge. This is the first laboratory-scale flow battery experiment to report more than a year of continuous use with minimal loss of capacity.

[weatheriscool]

Student team breaks the 4-minute barrier for EV fast-charging
By Paul Ridden
July 13, 2023
https://newatlas.com/automotive/inmotio ... -charging/

It's often the case that technologies developed for racing vehicles trickle down to the wider automotive market. With an endurance race in its sights, a team of more than 30 students at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) in the Netherlands has developed a technology that's allowed a 250-km battery pack to be fast-charged in under four minutes.

A few years ago, 10 students from TU/e joined forces to create the InMotion team, with hopes of building a technologically advanced electric racer that could take part in the 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance competition.

Since then, a number of vehicles have been built – and one or two lap records broken along the way. While developing the recent Revolution prototype, the team managed to get the battery pack to 80% capacity in 12 minutes. But that wasn't fast enough, so InMotion embarked on a two-year quest to significantly reduce plug-in times.

[weatheriscool]

Cheap proton batteries compete with lithium on energy density
By Loz Blain
July 27, 2023

https://newatlas.com/energy/rmit-proton ... y-density/

RMIT engineers say they've tripled the energy density of cheap, rechargeable, recyclable proton flow batteries, which can now challenge commercially available lithium-ion batteries for capacity with a specific energy density of 245 Wh/kg.

That's as compared to the ~260-odd Wh/kg delivered by the lithium-ion batteries in a current Tesla Model 3 battery pack, but without using any lithium, thus avoiding a forecasted lithium squeeze, as well as geopolitically sensitive dependence on China in the battery supply chain, and all kinds of end-of-life issues.

We've covered this particular team's work before, way back in 2014, when the first proof of concept of a hydrogen-based proton flow battery was announced.

Essentially, it's a different way of using hydrogen for energy storage. The proton battery works something like a reversible fuel cell, accepting water while charging, splitting out positively-charged hydrogen ions and releasing oxygen.

[weatheriscool]

Solar batteries: A new material makes it possible to simultaneously absorb light and store energy
https://techxplore.com/news/2023-07-sol ... bsorb.html
by University of Córdoba

A collaborative effort between the University of Cordoba and the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research (Germany) is making progress on the design of a solar battery made from an abundant, non-toxic and easily synthesized material composed of 2D carbon nitride. The work is published in the journal Advanced Energy Materials.

Solar energy is booming. The improvement of solar technology's capacity to capture as much light as possible, convert it into energy and make it available to meet energy needs is key in the ecological transition towards a more sustainable use of energy sources.

In the process between the collection of light by the solar cell and the on-demand use of energy by household appliances, for example, storage plays a crucial role since the availability of solar energy has an inherent intermittency.

To facilitate this storage process and deal with problems such as the environmental impact of the extraction, recycling or scarcity of some of the materials necessary for conventional batteries (such as lithium), the concept of the "solar battery" was born. Solar batteries combine the solar cells that capture light with the storage of its energy in one single device, which then allows the energy to be used when needed.

Alberto Jiménez-Solano, a researcher at the Department of Physics of the University of Cordoba, together with a team from the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research (Stuttgart, Germany), has carried out a study in which he has explored the design characteristics of a solar battery made from a material based on 2D carbon nitride.

"In Professor Bettina V. Lotsch's group, at the Max Planck Institute, they had managed to synthesize a material capable of absorbing light and storing that energy for later use on demand," explains Alberto Jiménez-Solano, "and it occurred to us to use it to create a solar battery."

[caltrek]

'Electrified Cement' Could Turn the Foundations of Buildings Into Giant Batteries
by David Neld
August 2, 2023

Introduction:

(Science Alert) Scientists are constantly searching for better ways to store renewable energy, and MIT researchers have now found a way to turn cement and an ancient material into a giant supercapacitor.

Potentially, this electrified cement could turn building foundations and roads into almost limitless batteries.

To create the new substance, a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University in the US mixed together cement, water and carbon black – a material like a fine charcoal that is created from incomplete combustion processes.

"The material is fascinating, because you have the most-used human made material in the world, cement, that is combined with carbon black, that is a well-known historical material – the Dead Sea Scrolls were written with it," says Admir Masic, a materials scientist at MIT.

"You have these at least two-millennia-old materials that when you combine them in a specific manner you come up with a conductive nanocomposite, and that's when things get really interesting."

Read more here: https://www.sciencealert.com/electrifi ... batteries

[weatheriscool]

One step closer to lithium metal batteries that function with minimal external pressure
https://techxplore.com/news/2023-08-clo ... ction.html
by Daniel Kane, University of California - San Diego

A team of battery researchers led by the University of California San Diego and University of Chicago has developed a new methodology to produce the potentially game-changing thin-film solid-state electrolyte called lithium phosphorus oxynitride (LiPON). The team went on to implement their free-standing version of LiPON film in functional battery tests and found that it promotes a uniformly dense lithium metal electrochemical deposition under zero external pressure, with the aid of internal compressive stress and a gold seeding layer. This work, performed by a team of battery researchers led by the University of California San Diego and University of Chicago, was published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology on August 03, 2023.

The research team is led by battery researcher and professor Ying Shirley Meng, who is affiliated with both the University of Chicago and UC San Diego. The first author is Diyi Cheng, a recently graduated Ph.D. in the Materials Science and Engineering Program at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering who is continuing his research efforts at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The team also includes researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and UC Berkeley.

[weatheriscool]

A new LMR cathode that minimizes voltage decay in Li-ion batteries
https://techxplore.com/news/2023-08-lmr ... decay.html
by Ingrid Fadelli , Tech Xplore

Lithium-ion batteries (LiBs), rechargeable batteries that store energy by leveraging the reversible reduction of Li ions, remain among the most widely used battery technologies worldwide. These batteries power a wide range of devices, ranging from smartphones, headphones and PCs to smart appliances and electric vehicles.

A team of researchers at City University of Hong Kong, Northwestern University, and other institutes in the United States has been trying to devise strategies and solutions that could improve the performance of LiBs, extending their life and increasing their energy capacity. In a recent paper published in Nature Energy, the team introduced a new cathode that could increase the capacity of LiBs, by tackling a well-documented limitation of existing cathodes.

[weatheriscool]

MIT Spinoff Plans Liquid Metal Batteries for Power Grid
Ambri promises lower energy storage costs with batteries that last 20 years.
By Ryan Whitwam August 10, 2023

Governments around the world are investing heavily in renewable energy, but even the most well-considered plans to phase out fossil fuels are missing one crucial ingredient: energy storage. Battery technology is advancing at a snail's pace, as anyone constantly topping up their smartphone can attest. A new startup, which began as an MIT experiment, promises to change that. Ambri says its liquid metal batteries are safe, inexpensive, and perfect for the electrical grid.

Today, most high-capacity batteries use some variation of lithium-ion technology, but these designs rely on rare and expensive materials. The problem is even bigger when you need to power the electrical grid. As a result, MIT estimates the average cost of storing a kilowatt-hour of energy is $405, but that number needs to get closer to $20 to make renewable energy a reality.

https://www.extremetech.com/energy/mit- ... power-grid

[weatheriscool]

CATL Launches Ultrafast Charging Car Battery – 240 Miles of Range in 10 Minutes
August 19, 2023 by Brian Wang

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2023/08/c ... nutes.html
Dr. Wu Kai, CATL Chief Scientist, presented at the CATL new product launch 2023 event (charge to the future in a flash) on August 16, 2023.

CATL launched Shenxing, the world’s first 4C superfast charging LFP battery, capable of delivering 400 km of driving range with a 10-minute charge as well as a range of over 700 km on a single full charge. A 1C charging would mean a full charge in one hour and 4C means a full charge in 15 minutes.

[weatheriscool]

Research shows zinc-air batteries could be the future of powering electric vehicles
https://techxplore.com/news/2023-08-zin ... ctric.html
by Edith Cowan University

Zinc-air batteries have emerged as a better alternative to lithium in a recent Edith Cowan University (ECU) study into the advancement of sustainable battery systems.

ECU's Dr. Muhammad Rizwan Azhar led the project which discovered lithium-ion batteries, although a popular choice for electric vehicles around the world, face limitations related to cost, finite resources, and safety concerns. The work is published in the journal EcoMat.

"Rechargeable zinc-air batteries (ZABs) are becoming more appealing because of their low cost, environmental friendliness, high theoretical energy density, and inherent safety," Dr. Muhammad Rizwan Azhar said.

"With the emergence of next-generation long-range vehicles and electric aircraft in the market, there is an increasing need for safer, more cost-effective, and high-performance battery systems that can surpass the capabilities of lithium-ion batteries."