For the tech nerds out there, check out this intriguing article in the new Technology Review.
It’s about a new kind of battery in which all the active materials are liquid (molten metals and molten salt) rather than solids. This gives it several advantages over the whole range of solid-state batteries now available. It’s cheap and easily scaleable, and most importantly, it can handle very high currents. It looks like an incredibly promising solution for utility-scale storage of intermittent resources like sun and wind.
You can hear this all explained by MIT’s Donald Sandoway in the nerdtastic video at the link.
As always, it’s all about cost-effective scale. No sense celebrating yet. But every scrap of hopeful news on energy storage is worth sharing.
Comments
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Delay And Deny Posted 4:01 pm
01 Mar 2009
Hydrogen is light.
An empty hydrogen tank weighs little.
An empty battery weights the same full or empty.
Hence...
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amazingdrx Posted 11:14 pm
01 Mar 2009
Wow this looks great! It could be expanded to any size with more cells and more liquid metal and molten salt.
The electrodes can operate at electrical currents "tens of times higher than any [battery] that's ever been measured," says Donald Sadoway, a materials chemistry professor at MIT and one of the battery's inventors. What's more, the materials are cheap, and the design allows for simple manufacturing.
I wonder what temperature the cells operate at? The operating temperature could be maintained and stabilized with the correct heat storage salt surrounding the cells.
It would be a fixed location utility scale battery technology, not a portable vehicle battery. This might be the perfect battery to store power on an HVDC super grid.
Could it be a distributed battery too, located in homes, factories, and buildings? Probably so, he speculates on that in the audio. He says it will take 5 years to go commercial, with still secret liquid metals, the ones in the example would make the batteries impractically large, so it's not a done deal yet and might turn out to be "vaporware".
Being a battery chemist he does not have a real conception of smart grid technology, evidenced by this statement about meeting peak demand on batteries alone.
One big enough to meet the peak electricity demand in New York City--about 13,000 megawatts--would fill nearly 60,000 square meters. Charging it would require solar farms of unprecedented size, generating not only enough electricity to meet daytime power needs but enough excess power to charge the batteries for nighttime demand.
This misunderstanding actually expands the potential beyond his limted vision of the grid.
One storage technology that has been overlooked is compressed air storage coupled with geothermal or solar heat storage, by adding heat to compressed air stored in a deep geothermal well pipe generation/storage capacity would be many times simple compressed air storage. And it would use no water and release no steam into underground rock or aquifers.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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Ted Clayton Posted 1:49 am
02 Mar 2009
The more typical limitation with batteries isn't the amperage or voltage it can inherently handle (we can series-parallel cells (dynamically, even) to get what we need), but the number of charge-cycles in it's life-span, and it's resilience to abuse (which is common for many battery-applications).
For a molten-metal system like this to cool off - freeze - can be a total disaster.
This thing is hot. Salt melts at 1,473 degrees F. That's beyond red-hot and into the medium-yellow range. In very large utility applications, thermal insulation & efficiency is more practical to achieve, but in small roles, like for a car, there will be show-stopper compromises. Loss of heat equals loss of energy/charge.
Molten sodium is amoung the most corrosive, chemically-reactive substances there is. As is salt. Nasty, nasty stuff, and not an obvious bet for longevity.
'Secret metals' means it's not new, not an invention: It's existing technology/art, otherwise, he'd just patent it. He's already got 14 - he knows the drill. [Later, I will go the Patent & Trade Office and see if DS has any more-recent patent-applications - but the language he uses suggests what I say above.]
Battery-science & technology has received absolutely phenomenal attention since the advent of electrical & electronic systems, well back into the 19th C. The military dependency on batteries is life & death, and they have poured high-quality people & money into the quest, continuously for 100 years.
My vote for best battery for the load-leveling role is the Edison Cell or Nickel-Iron technology. It is the toughest, most durable, longest lasting of all standard configurations ... and I think those are the qualities most-critical to utility-scale storage on a daily cycle-regimen. Nickel supplies might could be a problem.
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biodiversivist Posted 1:51 am
02 Mar 2009
Daydreams. MIT has a well oiled press release machine. It's their version of popular mechanics where 98% of the ideas presented never bear fruit.
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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Pompey Road Posted 2:10 am
02 Mar 2009
The eons of time and nature was good to us down here. It was not until we become civilized that destroying our habitat become fathomable or fashionable.
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Ted Clayton Posted 3:00 am
02 Mar 2009
The Wiki page says they last 30-50 years ... and I have heard of people restoring old neglected, cast-off railroad (signal) cells that were older than that.
Like Sandoway's design, Edisons have a metal (iron) case that is one of the electrodes. It's literally a light-weight steel strong-box or safe.
Ah - "Nickel-iron batteries have long been used in European mining operations because of their ability to withstand vibrations, high temperatures and other physical stress." ibid
Lead-acid gel designs offer added support to fragile plates, the gel supports additives that improve & protects the chemistry, and of course prevents electrolyte leakage.
More recently there are drastically-enhanced designs also being called 'gell', but they are much different. I have just recently started reading up on this stuff, but it looks like it allows denser plate-spacing, higher discharge rates, and more protection from damaging chemistry. They appear to be using various fiber-matrixes to strengthen the gell, and the fiber like the gell is used to host amendments that improve the overall performance.
If we went lead-acid for utility-storage, we might want to stay with liquid electrolyte because for one, maximum energy-density isn't such a priority in a large-scale stationary facility, and because we could include a 'captive' plate-reforming factory with the battery-farm and make cells that open up so they can be refurbished ... with fresh plates made onsite, using extra electricity during the surplus part of the cycle.
A dedicated crew does nothing else but forklift tired cells to the refurb-shop, and trundle restored ones back out to the racks. These cells weigh maybe a ton each, with plates the size of half a sheet of plywood.
With great big cells like this, the benefits of advanced electrolyte configurations would probably be secondary to easy of servicing.
For household use, the new 'matrix' lead-acid designs might be very good. I think some of this development has been aimed at cars, though of course it lacks the 'sex appeal' of other newer chemistries.
Lead-acid cars can be done even with the old clunker designs, if there is an on-board motor-generator, and economy can be very high. But for a pure plug-in, the battery-pack becomes too large & heavy before you get decent range. I think the 'matrix' batteries aim for a pure plug-in ... but not with Volt performance. ;-)
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Ted Clayton Posted 3:32 am
02 Mar 2009
The good news is, though, that even the stupidest batteries could support a great deal of what we really want. The limitation isn't really with the battery-technologies we have, but rather with the consumer-mentality.
Using & taking care of even the most old-fashioned batteries is certainly no more of an imposition than milking a herd of cows. Has to happen 712 time a year, morning & night, and all the rest.
But millions did it, for generations. With a change of consumer-attitudes (which is what all this hot social action really boils down to), people could manage their own little energy-kingdoms.
The main deal with batteries is not that they have to be snazzy or powerful, but that they have to be taken care of, right - just like cows.
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BILL HANNAHAN Posted 3:42 am
02 Mar 2009
It sounds like this technology is about where the VBR flow battery was in 1980.
http://www.alaska.edu/uaf/cem/ine/aetdl/conferences/2008P ...
28 years later VBR folded.
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2009/1/6/0933/98148
Things Everybody Should Know About Energy
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