Why Solid Carbon is the Future of Energy Storage

This is a block of graphite and has super

energy

powers. Its incredible

carbon

structure means it's strong enough to withstand tremendous heat, but soft as a diamond is hard on the hardness scale anyway. I probably wouldn't want to sleep on it. It is a form of

solid

carbon

and has been powering pencils for centuries and now a similar form of

solid

carbon has generated a breakthrough in renewable

energy

. I spoke to solid carbon battery pioneers Torah Energy about their world's first block-charging thermal energy

storage

system. that are much larger than this at incredible temperatures so that they can supply clean, continuous heat or electricity to fossil fuel-starved industries, from the buildings we live in to the food we eat and the way we communicate, almost everything.

What we do depends on the burning of heavy industry. fossil fuels to obtain energy and heat 24 hours a day in thousands of degrees. Antor is not the only company trying to solve these challenges using thermal batteries that store energy in the form of heat instead of chemical bonds, but they found many magical properties in solid carbon that marked a breakthrough and this has incredible potential to create Durable, high-performance batteries with the power to run scorching industrial processes with cheap renewable energy available. Anor was founded in 2018 by Stanford and MIT graduates determined to tackle climate change through their re SE Arch.

In thermal energy

storage

systems, they became convinced that it is not only possible, but also cost-effective, for industrial processes depend on renewable energy. I spoke with its co-founder, Dr. Justin Briggs, to learn more about their mission to decarbonize heavy industry. First, we take renewable electricity. the wind could be solar it could be geothermal and we use that electricity to resistively heat large blocks of solid carbon, so you can think of this like your toaster heating toast, except we do it at much higher temperatures and we're doing it with solid carbon, very similar to the pencil tip, the graphite inside your pencil.

These blocks of solid carbon are stored inside an insulated container, so imagine a unit the size of a shipping container and then the energy can be discharged as either. They process heat or electricity directly and Tor batteries are at over 2000°C, which is one-third the surface temperature of the Sun and hot enough to melt steel. The temperatures that the battery can offer are more than 1, 1500° C, which is precisely what processes such as steel treatment, glass manufacturing and advanced ceramic engineering are needed and until recently have only been obtainable from of fossil fuels. Justin, explain to me why there is a difference between the temperature of the battery and the temperature that the battery provides.

You need to be able to have plenty of temperature headroom above that temperature delivery point because otherwise you won't be storing energy, so if you want to deliver power at 1450 Celsius you can't have a maximum operating temperature of 15 or 1600 Celsius. because your delta T is so small that you don't store much energy and that increases the cost through the roof, so you really need to be able to get to 18 19 2000 or more to have a profitable product at those temperatures that are now another incredible thermal energy . There are battery systems, from sand batteries to concrete brick toasters, which I covered in a previous video, but Noto's secret weapon that makes it possible for Anor batteries to store and release heat at such high temperatures is solid carbon, something similar to cheap.

Low Quality 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 quality graphite that still has a decent level of graphitization is what makes pencils possible, this is because of its importance. Crystalline structure formed by the stacking of graphene layers arranged in a hexagonal lattice. There are strong Cove valent bonds in each layer, but the layers themselves are loosely bonded and slide over each other easily. This is why graphite is used in lubricants and also why pencil marks stick. On paper, the layers of graphite come off from 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 has four electrons, they are only connected to three other carbon atoms. the delocalized fourth electron can move freely, which is brilliant for conducting electricity and heat, and graphite has them in abundance subject to extreme heat. Graphite gives off a thermal glow, although heat is quickly conducted through the graphite. Heat transfer refers to the environment and occurs mainly through the incredibly powerful light radiation when you look at something like a rock material, a sand material, a concrete or any type of refractory brick, the thermal conductivity is much lower and That means it's harder to push heat into the material and harder to pull it away. removes heat from the material, so graphite has stellar thermal conductivity relative to these other storage materials, dramatically simplifying the overall system design and allowing us to use simpler heat introduction and removal mechanisms.

Pioneering the use of solid carbon is what establishes a taus. thermal battery apart from the three magical properties of thermal stability High thermal conductivity and high specific heat capacity allow a relatively small modularly packaged product to provide continuous and reliable heat and electricity on an industrial scale. Industrial processes such as steel, cement, concrete and ceramics are all around us as single-category heavy industry is responsible for more emissions than transportation and has received far less attention in the quest for zero carbon emissions. Unlike things like flying on private jets, communications networks and renewable energy infrastructure are not luxuries, we cannot simply reduce our dependence.

About them, an article I read said that it is only because we don't know how to do it, that heavy industry continues to power 40% of the energy produced globally. To me, two reasons seem to stand out why decarbonizing seems impossible. Heavy industry, firstly, 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 is simply not reliable. sufficient and storage has been prohibitively expensive; Secondly, capital intensive industries whose expensive assets have a long useful life, so the agile and clean replacement technologies that transport has been able to implement are not an option until recently, this seemed like an unsolvable problem, but The solid carbon battery has real potential to change this, so let's take a closer look at how it works inside the battery environment, but first I really need to get this out of the way, there are literally layers of graphene everywhere, but luckily I printed a support using today's. sponsor onshape I am very excited to work with onshape again because I love their product and I think you will too on shape is a professional level computer DEA 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 test it properly.

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Heating charcoal blocks: Think of solid charcoal like toast in a toaster, except it doesn't burn as it heats up; It simply becomes more energy dense as more and more heat fits into the same space because the solid carbon blocks can remain stable. At temperatures up to 3000°C a large amount of energy can be stored extremely effectively in batteries the size of shipping containers, in case you were wondering, not only are they very well insulated but they are also covered with a layer made of steel so that the scorching temperatures inside can be safely handled thanks to the insulation, thermal batteries can keep heat for days, but what about the release or delivery of this energy due to high temperatures above 1.1500° C?

More than 90% of heat transfer is achieved through that insulation. The thermal glow we saw before, radiation or light from hot coal moves heat, is incredibly simple and Antorus developed a cool mechanism to direct this heat where it is needed. One way we like to think of this is like an industrial decarbonization flashlight and basically you have these hot glowing blocks contained and you just need to open a shutter or open a door to release that thermal glow and then you can deliver that thermal glow directly to a fluid. processed, such as steam or thermal. oil that is already being used in an IND industrial facility, but that is only to deliver heat.

Anor's battery can also deliver electricity. Anor's second not-so-secret weapon is a photovoltaic panel that converts heat into electricity by shining the intense beam of radiant light from the flashlight on a special photovoltaic panel; the infrared radiation from the thermal glow is converted into electricity. It's like a solar panel, only it uses infrared radiation instead of visible light from sunlight, so instead of a normal photovoltaic panel, this is a TVP panel. Makes sense. Antor now runs the world system. The largest production line of these POS cells allows the conversion of heat into energy without moving parts. Through intensive research and development, they have increased thermophotovoltaic efficiency to over 40%.

This may seem a bit low, but it is actually incredibly impressive compared to the roughly 20% efficiency of standard panels on many roofs. What makes this possible is to maximize the available photons, that thermal glow coming off the hot coal is a broadband light source, meaning there are photons with different energies emitted from that hot coal, many of those photons do not have enough energy to create a complete pair of electrons in the semiconductor that is the photovoltaic device and those photons usually They are simply lost or wasted in a solar PV application, so those low-energy photons lead to inefficiencies and, in effect, set a theoretical upper limit. in the physical efficiency that you can achieve with that device, which is about 33% for a single junction solar PV device.

In our case, those low energy photons cannot yet be used directly in the semiconductor because it is the same type of semiconductors that they use. in solar PD, but we can put a mirror on the back of the device that allows us to reflect those low energy photons back to the source where they can be reabsorbed, so they normally pass through the semiconductor because they can't be absorbed. our mirror, return through the semiconductor, exit through the front of the semiconductor and are then reabsorbed into the carbon, thus maintaining its high temperature and allowing the possibility of another higher energy photon being emitted that can then generate electricity.

I honestly think this idea of ​​a mirror surface is very clever, however, this idea of ​​giving a photon a second chance wouldn't really work with regular solar PV because if it goes down, if you reflect it, Ed, it would just go into the atmosphere and you could never stoprecover it because there is no thermal battery to recover it. The interconnected advantages of the solid carbon battery are so many that it is difficult to summarize them without sounding like an advertisement. It uses cheap and abundantly available materials with existing supply chains to generate energy. Dense, modular, easy-to-transport batteries that deliver reliable, powerful clean power to existing industrial processors and assets.

This not only reduces carbon emissions but also reduces operating costs greatly because it uses excess renewable energy Most days at noon in California, energy is free electricity on the wholesale market is worth 0 dollars, a sometimes even negative, because so much solar energy has now been installed in California. The reason electricity sometimes can't be given away for free is because if supply and demand aren't perfectly balanced, power surges can cause outages. the entire grid, if wind turbines on a windy night generate more electricity than people need to use because everyone is asleep, then that is an excess and because of the rise of the renewable energy sector, there is often this excess available and storing all our excess.

Renewable energy in currently available lithium iron batteries is not as sustainable because they require rare metals and minerals that are often difficult and destructive to extract, expensive to produce and with a relatively short lifespan, which is why thermal batteries are a real turning point for electricity storage. The reason they can be so good goes beyond their actual efficiency, which to be honest, if you compare it just like lithium ion batteries don't look as good on a lithium ion battery, the efficiency of going and return of electricity that is converted into a chemical bond and back into electricity is between 90 and 95% with resistive heating, thermal energy storage converts 99% of the electricity it receives into heat and releases between 90 and 95% of it as heat again so far so good but the round trip efficiency when you convert heat back into electricity is reduced to around 30 to 40% however you have to take other If you take these into account When you store energy that would otherwise be wasted and cheaply use abundant materials already in mass production, the whole question of efficiency is seen in a different light, especially if you buy electricity for next to nothing and it is discharged when it is extremely high value and then there is the lifespan which is hard to compare directly but the average lifespan of lithium iron batteries in grid energy storage is around 4 to 6 years According to Antor, its thermal batteries will be able to be used for 30 years or more without degradation.

This has not yet been fully tested, 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 by Anor CEO Andrew Ponic, the combination of low feedstock costs, high heat capacity and massive thermal temperature change results in the carbon storage medium reaching a price as low as $1 per KW. Low material costs are big here and are said to be about 15 times lower than molten salt and 50 times lower than lithium-ion batteries. It should be noted here that these are just the material costs rather than the levelized cost of storage, although when everything is taken into account, the total system cost will still be an order of magnitude cheaper than the lithium-ion batteries they replace when They are deployed at scale and When we started the company a few years ago, the space was practically empty and in the last few years a lot of different companies have emerged that use different storage architectures and different storage materials, which is fantastic, it is a sign That people are realizing that this is a really exciting way to decarbonize heavy industry, that to me is what makes this technology so promising for the industry and with 2023 declared the hottest year on record by 0.15 Ever It has been possible to find ways to reduce emissions in practical and cost-effective ways.

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