Battery Chemistry and Gravity : Energy Storage Series 2

As the immediacy of the climate crisis becomes ever more apparent, batteries hold the key to transitioning to a renewable-fueled world. Renewables will play a greater role in power generation, but without effective energy storage techniques, it’s an incomplete puzzle.

Chemical engineers have always been fascinated by the periodic table since our introductory days to materials, right from the days of ‘Baghdad battery’ almost 2000 years ago which was made up of ceramic jar, a tube of copper, and an iron rod and a lot of mystery around 'presence of acid' to today’s new age. 

We are looking at all materials available on the earth, which can provide the competitive advantage, chemically and logically, we need to look at cost competitive elements for a more sustainable production and consumption.

This is the Series 2 where we look into companies which could shape future in battery and hydro.

Click here for Series 1 where we had set the introduction to energy storage.

Click here for Series 3 where we look into companies which could shape future in thermal and crystal ball gazing. 😊

There are dozens of chemistry being looked at today. There are hundreds of companies working on scaling up and manufacturing new battery technology. Lithium ion has done remarkable things for technology and much has been talked about it but I would like to focus on other alternatives rather than lithium in this series.

A main alternative being explored is a flow battery, which looks into vanadium redox, polysulfide bromide, and zinc bromide chemistry.

One of the ways of using chemical (vanadium) flow storage technology is to use electrolyte across an ion exchange membrane. The advantages of this type of storage are safety, scalability and long term operations. Vanadium electrolyte used in this battery is non-flammable and allows the battery to operate at room temperature.

British startup RedT Energy produces storage machines that use proprietary redox flow technology to store energy in liquids without degrading. Inflow energy storage electrolyte is stored in tanks, outside of the cell stack making storage solutions scalable, as more electrolytes or stacks can be added on a modular basis. Moreover, these batteries have a long lifespan of over two decades.

Another one for the future is the zinc-iron flow batteries. These batteries are suitable for utility scale wind and solar applications. They are non-explosive, non-flammable, non-toxic, recyclable at the end of their life, and made from globally abundant materials. 

ViZn Energy is deploying a zinc-redox flow battery solution. Its batteries experience zero capacity fade over 20 years and are warranted for up to two cycles per day, giving them significantly more usable output than competitive batteries. The zinc-iron chemistry uses globally abundant materials and is non-flammable, non-toxic, and 100% recyclable at the end of its life.

Unlike lithium ion, flow batteries store liquid electrolyte in external tanks, implying that the energy from the electrolyte and the actual source of power generation are decoupled. The electrolyte is stored within the battery itself. 

Electrolyte chemistries vary, but across the board, these aqueous systems don't pose a fire risk and most don't face the same issues with capacity fade. Once they scale up their manufacturing, these companies say they'll be price competitive with lithium ion.

Primus Power has been working in this space since 2009, and uses a zinc bromide chemistry. It's raised over millions of dollars in funding, including a number of government grants from agencies like the Department of Energy and the California Energy Commission.

Primus's modular EnergyPod provides 25 kilowatts of power, enough to power five to seven homes for five hours during times of peak energy demand and for 12 to 15 hours during off-peak hours. The secret is in simplicity. Primus is able to separate the electrochemical species by taking advantage of the density differences between the zinc bromine and the bromine itself, and the more aqueous portion of that electrolyte.

Another interesting company is ESS Inc, an Oregon-based manufacturer of iron flow batteries, founded in 2011. They're basically batteries in a shipping container and they can provide anywhere from100 kilowatts of power for four hours to 33 kilowatts for 12 hours, using an electrolyte made entirely of iron, salt and water.

ESS is backed by some major players like SoftBank Energy, the Bill Gates-led investor fund, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, and insurance company Munich Re. Its systems, called Energy Warehouses. It's also in the process of developing its Energy Center, which is aimed at utility-scale applications in the 100 MW plus range. That would be 1,000 times more power than a single Energy Warehouse. A lot is to be seen … with hopeful intent.

But for all their potential, flow battery companies like Primus and ESS Inc still aren't really designed to store energy for days or weeks on end.

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Many of those flow battery technologies still suffer from the same fundamental materials cost challenges that make them incapable of getting to tens or hundreds of hours of energy storage capacity. 

Other non-lithium ion endeavors, such as the M.I.T spinoff Ambri, face the same problem with longer-duration storage and Form energy, a battery company with an undisclosed chemistry, is targeting the weeks or months long storage market, but commercialization remains far off.  

Let's look at one of the most basic and ideally one of the oldest ways of stored energy process - Pumped Hydro.

Currently, about 70-80% of the world's energy storage comes from pumped hydro.

When there's excess energy on the grid, it's used to pump water uphill to a high-elevation reservoir. Then when there's energy demand, the water is released, driving a turbine as it flows into a reservoir below. The flaw in the system is that it requires a lot of land, disrupts the environment and the natural working of the geography and can function in specific geographies.

My gut feel says that in the next decade we are going to explore this energy storage process in the places where the geology and the environmental features support it.

Energy Vault, a Swiss gravity-based storage company founded in 2017, was inspired by the concept but thinks it can offer more. Instead of moving water, Energy Vault uses cranes and wires to move heavy (35ton) bricks up and down, depending on energy needs, in a process that's automated with machine vision software. The system tower crane utilizes excess solar or wind to drive motors and generators that lift and stack the bricks in a specific sequence. Then when the power is needed from the grid, that same system will lower the bricks and discharge the electricity.

It can store energy at around half the cost of existing grid-scale storage solutions on a low levelized cost of energy basis, including operations and maintenance costs and parts replacement and can run to 3 to 4 decades with high efficiency and almost zero degradation. This system is sized for utility-scale operation.

A standard installation could include 20 towers, providing a total of 350 megawatt hours of storage capacity, enough to power around 40,000 homes for 24 hours. The trick for this segment will be scale at very large deployments of multiple systems so that they'll have that power on demand for weeks if not months.

It has received funding of $110M from SoftBank Vision Fund, and it's building out a test facility in Milan, Italy in 9months and less than $2 million and a plant for Tata Power for 35MWh.

https://www.ft.com/content/5b06a392-be9b-11e9-89e2-41e555e96722

End of Series 2.

In the next series, let’s look into thermal store energy and some crystal ball gazing into the future.

Future of Energy Storage - Oorja, Huolì, Energie, Sakti Series 1

The art of Storage has meant different things across different cultures and timelines in the history of mankind.

Storage was looked as a way to secure basic necessities, and people looked to this concept as a way to utilize abundance in the times of scarcity. This could have a larger connotation being obsessed with ‘saving for a rainy day’ and utilizing the future needs in an optimal way. It was not until the latest century, that scientific scrutiny was finally applied to concept of abundance and storage.

Energy is a key source in the makeup of the universe and matter and storage is a key variable towards the solving the equation of limitless energy equation.

Energy or Oorja /Huolì/ energie/ energia/ sakti/ energiya - these words combined are known to more than 4.5 Billion people in different language around the world but the essence is the universal underlying need of E- mc2. Humans will take E in whatever form we get it. 😊

I will break the whole narrative in to three series as the content is long for readers and as a thinker for me to keep them in rapt attention.

Series 1 is what you are reading

Click here for Series 2 - we look into companies which could shape future in battery and hydro.

Click here for Series 3 - we look into companies which could shape future in thermal and crystal ball gazing. 😊 

As the race for climate action escalated (Al Gore campaign) in the start of the century, the need for an alternative structure becomes all the more important and essential.

The last decade of action has led to the pricing efficiency of the renewables, solar panels and wind farms panels have reached all-time lows, leading to gigawatts (GWs) worth of renewable energy generation.

But some say say, “What would you do when the wind isn't always blowing and the sun isn't always shining.”

On a bright sunny day or a whistling windy day, we've got a super abundance of electricity, in other scenarios, the renewables are still catching up on delivery expectations.

The real issue is to ensure there's always energy on demand no matter the time of day or weather, is one of the biggest challenges in the industry. That’s brings up to come up with a good way to store energy and draw it as and when needs arises.

Globally, the wind energy market will hit 8.5 % CAGR till 2025 and install nearly 325 GW, reaching close to 980 GW by the timeline. No small feat considering we were have taken 20 years to reach at 651 GW at the end of 2019.

Solar PV generation is estimated to have increased 720 TWh in 2019, overtaking bio energy to be third largest renewable electricity technology.

And it's not stopping there. It’s on an accelerated path to install and change the research technology to Perovskite solar cells. Each of the sector warranting a story of their own and creating an impression on the energy timeline of Earth.

We know today that solar PV and wind are the least expensive way to generate electricity and others are now catching up..  In particular, the price of solar photovoltaics has plummeted far faster than all forecasts predicted, after China flooded the market with cheap panels in the late 2000s.

Every money manager/ investor/ govt did not believe that solar was going to ever stand on its own without subsidies. Today as solar has gotten cheaper, so too have lithium ion batteries, the technology that powers electric vehicles, our cell phones and laptops.

And thanks to improved manufacturing techniques and economies of scale, costs have fallen 90% since 2010.

Now, wind or solar plus battery storage is often times more economical than thermal power plants, that is, power plants that only fire when demand is high.

One of the current option also revolves around lithium ion batteries. Currently, the prices of lithium ion is dropping though with the usage scale which it can amass, it will remain too expensive for most grid-scale applications.

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In order to be economically viable for grid scale levels, we need to look at a further cost reduction of atleast 10 to 15x. Currently, lithium ion batteries just can't store more than four to five hours worth of energy at a price point that would make sense. There are a lot of research which are currently in pipeline but not yet feasible on economical and viable scale of mass production yet.

Plus, they pose a fire risk and their ability to hold a charge reduces drastically over time. To address this, there are cadre of entrepreneurs experimenting with a variety of different solutions. 

Now we're seeing flow batteries, which are liquid batteries, and we're seeing other forms of storage that are not chemical or battery-based storage. Honestly, one can’t but be amazed with the scale of research which is currently happening in this space and these each has serious potential with far reaching implications changing the way we will look into stored energy in the decades to come.

But this doesn't mean lithium ion is necessarily economical for other grid applications. The cost structure wouldn't coming down to the point where it can serve those tens to hundreds of hours applications. 

Basically, the market is ripe for competition.

End of Series 1.

In the next series, let’s look into which technologies could prevail, but the undeniable holy grail will be to figure out a better way to store energy.

Time to Step down, or Step out : Jeff Bezos' strategy directive to Andy Jazzy

The latest news of Jeff Bezos stepping down and handing over the reins has started a fresh debate about how to take the mother away from the baby. if you were worrying about taking a side, its one the toughest topics to sit on the fence, experiencing it, a different matter altogether.

And yes! we are here only talking about entrepreneurial behemoth succession planning. So please put the right cap :)

The biggest challenge in succession planning is the timing of it. Though the PR agencies make it look like a planned process of handing reigns down for the Googles, Apples and the Microsofts, as it is important to take note of how entrepreneur led behemoths are setting up examples of leadership and legacy behind them. The godlike image of the Founder never wanes. So lets look a bit under the veil.   

Case example Microsoft (Bill) stepping down while anti-trust allegations were on, or Sundai Pichai appearing before the US Congress in his second year. We could se a similar story scripted for Amazon now. Amazon is now currently facing the antitrust law issues and the multiple other such as low wage for warehouse, or the Seattle tax issue.

The successors to these behemoths are always handed down these public appearances and inquiries and their frequent brush with the lawmakers, which hurt their public image and take focus away from the business at hand.

The FTC (Federal Trade Commission) bases these antitrust laws fundamentally on the Sherman Act of 1890. In my naive opinion, I strongly feel with such fast changing times the means and nature of business these measures need to change and adapt too. Another topic for another time.

The shoes which these founders leave are too big to fill and messy to sort out. The enigma and stature which the leaders leave behind for the successor to live upto is too much to handle. 

Its the outgoing leaders responsibility to make the public impressions smooth or the world ends up the something like the Ballmer era where markets get too critical of every move or decision and the pressure to deliver is unsurmountable, while the Founder moves to self actualization pursuits in public eye and into the realm of god mode.

Now coming to Amazon, it will be interesting too see someone being brought from the AWS program at the helm. The market for the cloud is searing up after the pandemic and the pie keeps getting larger. It was an obvious decision to get someone from AWS as it will be seeing double digit growth for the next decade. 

The major issues being with the current scope of workers issues including the recent directive to pay $62 Mn for the tips for delivery drivers and reemergence of 'starvation wages' consideration of warehouse employees could very quickly spell political trouble for Andy Jassy.

The sheer number of expected employees to touch 1.4 million by 2022 with a strong robotics presence in its workforce. Its going to one strategic move to handle the balance of firing and hiring, pay hikes and move to robotics maintenance for future workforce.

Jassy being from the AWS makes it very interesting to see the counter move of Google by making Bikram Singh Bedi its India head. Bikram set up and led the India AWS since 2012. Google will be looking to tip the balance in the most hottest ground of Cloud battle and more Google announcements could be expected in the next few months.

Another interesting aspect will be to see if the 'Shipment Zero' project remains with Bezos or go for Jazzy to handle. That could be a major outcry if not managed well for the next 5 years. Similarly, Project Kuiper will be closely watched by investors in the next 5 years

Amazon's Chinese market exit will also be interesting to be followed as Amazon sits out of one of the most lucrative markets of the world. It will worth observing how long will that be the case and different geopolitical pressure which Amazon (Jazzy) might have to balance to get the lobbying going.

Interesting times....