The Missing Link in Renewables

This video was made possible by CuriousStream. Subscribe to the Holiday Nebula package for only 11.79 per year at Curiositystream.com. Advance real engineering to get ad-free access to our new podcast module. If I asked you today what technological advancement the world needs most, what would you say? This should be a technology we can realistically develop in the next 10 years, so none of that sci-fi nonsense. This is something I think about a lot. Nuclear fusion or cheaper, safer and cleaner fission energy are good candidates. Human society would be transformed by affordable fusion energy, but fusion is certainly not a technology we can commercialize in the next 10 years.

Many people are working on safer and cheaper nuclear fission, but that too has many obstacles to overcome. I think about how the world would do it. would change if carbon nanotubes somehow became a viable material, a new stronger, lighter carbon nanotube caliber material wouldn't open doors to new design possibilities, it would open portals to new dimensions, but that again won't happen anytime soon. , no, if you did Choose a technology that would have the greatest impact on our society today and is within our reach. It would be cheap and scalable energy storage for the grid. The electrical grid operates almost entirely on a just-in-time manufacturing method.

We generate electricity just when it is needed. There is no electricity store that we can turn to. Pumped hydroelectricity provides some storage and is a technology that is almost centuries old, but it is not scalable for our current needs. Lithium-ion batteries are our best option at the moment. They have proven themselves in the The Hornsdale Power Reserve in Australia was primarily commissioned as a fast frequency response service, meaning it can act as a load when the grid frequency is too high or as a power source when the mains frequency is too low. A flywheel maintains the rotational speed of a motor.

You see, our networks are designed to operate on a particular AC frequency. If the network deviates from that frequency, it can cause all kinds of problems that usually only result in protective measures being activated to protect the infrastructure. and finally cuts power to its users a blackout South Australia was struggling with these blackouts in 2016 tornadoes devastated 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 production now, this was a huge problem because this is what power generation in South Australia looked like that day, with almost 50 percent of its energy coming from wind To cope with the sudden decline in wind power production the Victoria Interconnector attempted to increase its power transfer but was quickly shut down to prevent the line from burning out.

The network basically made the technological equivalent of a human fainting when he sees a drop of blood. A chain reaction of panic that left 850,000 people without electricity. 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. lacked the necessary interconnections with neighboring grids and energy storage facilities, such as pumped hydraulic batteries or simply natural gas power reserve plants, was poorly planned grid instability was inevitable, fortunately we are learning from these mistakes , but as renewable energy grows, the challenge of preventing blackouts like this is increasing. is going to grow, not only will we 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 there aren't.

This is going to be expensive. Lithium ion batteries are the cheapest we have right now, but at the end of the day, they were not designed for this job, they are designed to be light and energy dense for portable electronics, but for a stationary battery, it is a pretty useless trail, it's like having a submarine. The 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 economies of scale to reduce their price, but what would happen if we designed a new type of battery, a battery that was designed from the ground up specifically for the web to learn more about this i spoke with donald sadaway, a renowned professor of materials chemistry at mit and founder of the liquid metal battery company ambry, the last thing i do is seek advice from headlines incumbents are threatened by radical innovation, they realize that the lithium ion battery does not come from the battery industry, the battery industry refused to even make the lithium ion battery, so sony He wanted a better battery to power his portable device and this is 1990 and Sony goes to all the big battery producers in Japan and they go and say here's the formulation, build this and here's a purchase order to pick a number of some tens of millions of dollars and every single Japanese battery manufacturer said no, my In construction we have all this capital investment in manufacturing nickel metal hydride batteries.

We can't build this battery in that plant and so they said no, but someone at some point said, "Do you know if we want to have lithium ion batteries for our appliances, there's only one way to have them, we'll build them ourselves, so Sony He says he had a battery company, he says we need batteries and there's only one way to get them we build them ourselves and Sony built the first lithium ion battery manufacturing plant and very soon after that they started getting inquiries from people who were. making mobile phones saying, can we have them? and then people who are making mobile computers, laptops, can we have them?

In 1995, the nickel-metal hybrid was pretty much displaced, so what battery chemistry are you trying to build? Professor Saturay? Can it have the same disruptive and revolutionary effect on grid storage that lithium-ion batteries had for consumer electronics? The idea began simply. Professor Saturay had decades of experience. In electrolysis for refining metals like iron and aluminum, that process requires a lot of energy to refine the metal, so why not try to make that process reversible and allow the reverse reaction to return the electricity? This is the basic concept of the liquid metal batteries we use. alloying and dealloying 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 very cheap, make it with earth, so how do we do it?

Choosing materials for a battery like this What is the design ideation phase 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 he chooses materials for a technology like this. In the liquid metal battery, we must first refine our search to metals and metalloids, which are these elements. Next, we need to maximize the electronegativity difference to maximize our voltage. In general, electronegativity is highest at the top right of the periodic table and lowest across the periodic table. bottom left so our electrode materials can be further reduced to elements from these two groups below as professor sataway said if we want our battery to be very cheap we have to make it from earth so let's graph our abundance relative elements of the candidate.

The elements for our negative electrode, calcium, is by far the most common, which is the amber liquid metal battery negative electrode. However, they did not arrive at their current electrode materials simply by analyzing the periodic table. Experimentation was vital since it is a complex and dynamic process. system, they have tested various combinations of different electrode materials from these two groups and there are many complicated interactions to consider. Ambry has landed on a cellular chemistry of calcium and antimony. So how does it work? These materials are placed together in a ceramic insulated cell when a current is applied, the materials begin to heat up and will eventually become liquids and the metals will naturally separate 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 cell construction very simple. Lithium-ion batteries use complicated coating processes to construct their electrodes. This is the state of charge now, when a charge is applied, the opposite electric current is experienced. This causes the calcium electrode to break down into a calcium cache ion and two electrons. The cache ion travels through the electrolytic bridge and combines with the antimony and electrons that have traveled in the external circuit to form a new alloy. This continues to happen until the calcium electrode is completely consumed.

Now we only have the new mixed alloy and the electrolyte. This is the discharge state, to return to the charge state we simply apply the opposite current and the reverse reaction occurs and a new battery is created. 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 charge shifting batteries to work are the exact ways that accelerate this degradation over time, carrying a lithium ion battery Lithium from full charge to zero is particularly damaging as low as 500 Deep cycles can reduce the capacity of the nca batteries Tesla uses by up to 20, which is about one year and four months of daily use for our charge-shifting batteries whose work will be daily;

However, the LFP batteries that Tesla has started using in their Chinese Model 3 degrade much more slowly even under deep cycling and they have stated that they will use LFP batteries for stationary storage in the future depending on the temperature at which they operate. LFP batteries drop to 85 to 95 percent of their capacity after 3,000 cycles. However, at a larger capacity drop, ambry has proven that its capacity loss is minimal even after 5000 cycles thanks to the continuous creation and destruction of its electrodes, allowing us to fully discharge our batteries daily for over 20 years. . You've probably been wondering if there are any downsides to keeping calcium antimony electrodes so hot that they melt.

On the one hand, we are going to lose some of our electricity by heating the materials up to operating temperature, which reduces our round trip efficiency, so explain it if putting in 100 units of electricity there is some loss because there is some heating in joules and so on with the liquid metal battery it is approximately 80 percent because the difference 20 is the loss of energy, it is desirable to heat the battery to keep it at that temperature. you say wow 80, that's a 20 percent loss, what's up with that? The round trip efficiency of the hydraulic pump is 70, so we are better than the hydraulic pump, but the thing is, this is a case of not answering irrelevant questions.

Because the key question is what is the cost of electricity, this is where things get a little complicated. Fortunately, we have an equation to calculate the levelized cost of electricity storage. It is determined by total costs, which are the sum of initial capital costs. the cost of ongoing operation and maintenance the cost of charging and end-of-life costs divided by the total electricity discharged based on the chemistry of Ambry's calcium antimony cells the cost of electrode materials greatly undercuts current generation lithium-ion with the full cost of liquid metal battery electrode materials cost $17 per kilowatt hour versus $51.2 per kilowatt hour for the more common nickel-manganese-cobalt batteries if they achieve reduce the initial capital cost by 66 percent, that decrease in round-trip efficiency is a minor concern these ongoing costs are difficult toPredicting the operation and maintenance costs of lithium-ion batteries could include purchasing more batteries to restore full capacity as the batteries deplete.

We also have very little data on end-of-life costs, which will be determined primarily by how easily disposable or recyclable the batteries are. For both metrics liquid metal batteries will likely have an advantage; However, even with the promise of liquid metal batteries, lithium-ion batteries have one major advantage over any potential competitors, they have had decades to work on manufacturing process and reduce their price and they are still getting cheaper. Ambry has shown that cellular chemistry works on a lab scale, but actually bringing a product to market is much more difficult than proving that science works. It's simply the long journey from the lab bench to the market.

You know, here at MIT, with my team of students and postdocs we worked on this, I had a concept and then we boiled it down to practice and then we got to the point where we said it's time to start a company now, how do you do it? does? take that and turn it into a marketable product that can be manufactured, you know, in college you know you make five cells and one of them works and you get a publication out of it and everyone high fives and so on, but but in the manufacturing you have to have everything it has to work so we had to design the manufacturing process and there is no one to turn to there is no model I can choose the brightest, most competent people in the lithium ion battery sector and almost everything. that they know is not applicable because the lithium ion chemistry is different, which means the battery format is different, their needs are different, I mean, they have to protect against thermal rise, we have to protect against thermal drop, we want to keep our batteries warm they are trying to keep their batteries from getting hot there are dielectric hermetic seals that have to survive 500 600 degrees centigrade so obviously they will have to be ceramic but ceramics are brittle and they don't like thermal excursions, but we have to be able to withstand thermal excursions and I can give you a ceramic.

You can do it like this, but it will cost something close to NASA's price. Designing a completely new product is not easy. Those dielectric hermetic seals in particular are a bit of complicated 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 side reactions, they need to be corrosion resistant, since these molten salt electrolytes can corrode. many materials and, in addition, it must 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 a commercially available rubber O-ring.

It's one thing to design a prototype that works, but it's a completely different beast to design a product that can be manufactured profitably and reliably. When lithium-ion batteries first hit the market in the 1990s, their price per kilowatt hour was over three thousand dollars, but over the last three decades that price has continually dropped to about $150 per kilowatt hour, there is no scenario in which amber will go out the door at this price, no matter how cheap the materials are. of your electrodes, the price of a new manufacturing method will offset any cost savings until economies of scale assume this difficulty of bringing a new technology to market despite the obvious potential advantages is called technology lock-in and makes it incredibly difficult for newcomers to enter the market if they cannot compete on cost from the start.

They're going to have a hard time finding buyers for new products like this to hit the market and begin their journey toward affordability. They often need to find a niche market where their benefits outweigh their costs. So where could liquid metal batteries find this market niche? We explain that 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 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 the entire facility. of battery storage in the state until the cause of the problem was found.

These disadvantages of lithium-ion batteries are exactly what will lead the way. Door for liquid metal batteries Liquid metal battery can work well in extreme conditions After all, the entire product is designed to work at 500 degrees No cold or hot environment will interfere with its operation, which makes the battery more suitable for hot 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 justify their high initial price to the right early adopter and that is exactly what has happened . Terascale is a data center company. which is building a scalable data center that will operate on its own renewable microgrid in the hot desert climate of Reno Nevada.

It has already built 23 megawatts of geothermal power and 10 megawatts of solar power as part of its phase 1, 20-megawatt data center. Attractive to companies that want to use green energy to run their servers and companies that want to protect their data from possible power outages or even cyber attacks through network vulnerabilities that have become increasingly common in the last decade, This microgrid will protect Terrascale customer data from such vulnerabilities. but to run on renewable energy 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 to build a huge 250 megawatt hour battery that will begin construction in 2021, enough storage to function. the 20 megawatt data center for 12 and a half hours will be an excellent test of the technology and I, for one, will be following closely because, if successful, it will revolutionize the way our networks operate, forming that

missing

link

of the renewable energies we talked about. with professor satterway in much more detail about his work with liquid metal batteries, but it's hard to squeeze all that detail into a youtube video, which is why we started modulus, a podcast hosted by me and stephanie from real science, a podcast where we We will immerse ourselves in people.

Behind the scientific stories we tell here on YouTube, we'll talk to the scientists who are at the forefront of research and the people affected by the topics we discuss, we'll learn what it's like to watch your life's work descend to the Martian surface with Babak. for dowsie we get the inside scoop with people like professor sataway, a pioneer in 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 module released on nebula today Streaming platform created by me and several other YouTube educational content creators.

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