> They remain costly, though, with a capital cost of around US $800 per kilowatt-hour, more than twice that of lithium-ion batteries.
I was surprised by this! Since this is not commercialised on a broad scale, I would have thought that the cost is nowhere near competitive. Twice seems very close. How close are we to introducing flow-batteries at a competitive price?
> Liu estimates that the tubular design should cut the cost of flow-battery power modules by roughly half. Plus, all the components in the cell are off the shelf, and scaling up the reactor cell design should be easy, since it is based on a commonly used design in the chemical industry.
So if this research pans out it sounds like very close. This isn’t a new concept and it’s mature so the probability of continuing savings is less than traditional battery technologies (eg there’s new kinds of batteries coming out that are cheaper and more energy dense than lithium ion). However, at grid scale this may have additional advantages beyond pure cost that make it attractive still.
I can't imagine this is more mature then lithium ion batteries, or traditional batteries in general. They are everywhere in my apartment but afaik flow batteries are not used yet.
I agree, especially on the industrial design and manufacturing side. The concept has exited for ages, and I love decoupling power and energy density for all kinds of reasons (though I'm sure standard batteries are just tuned perfectly enough in large facilities that it's no big difference).
But the big cost reductions don't happen because an idea is mature, they occur because they're being produced at large enough scale that lots of people have spent time and energy on all of the thousand tiny things that individually reduce the cost. The stuff in this article is borderline just industrial design and they're talking a 3x change in footprint?
There has to be lots of other low hanging fruit... we're still improving lithium battery electrodes and each improvement really does improve them. The same will be true for flow batteries if they ever get made at enough scale.
It sounds like the energy capacity and power output can be scaled independently of one another. But as this article is meant for a wide audience, I think they simplified the discussion by making some assumptions about the desired power output per kWh stored.
Not unreasonable. The details are always in the research paper after all.
kWh does not measure max power, it measures capacity. A kWh is a constant factor multiple of Joules. I’d think you could absolutely make the capacity larger (ie store more energy) by just making the tanks larger. The flow rate is the thing that seems to determine the power output.
Even 4x as much is still way closer than what I've thought. This is not commercialised on a mass scale yet, but batteries are and have been for ages. Billions and billions of dollars got invested into cheaper, better and faster. Even 4x just seems right around the corner if you consider just how much work went into making batteries cheaper.
One thing highly appealing about flow batteries at scale is that the significantly simplify recycling of the critical materials. The electrolytes are inherently easily separable from the electrodes, anf retrievable in bulk. And you have significantly less material in the electrodes and reaction module, per kwh stored over lifecycle, making reclamation of those materials proportionally easier at scale.
Recycling of lithium ion batteries is not a major issue. There just hasn't been sufficient volume to justify a recycling business until very recently. Now there are numerous lithium ion battery recycling companies making hefty profits and growing rapidly.
> showed that the battery had a charge densities of about 1,322 watts per liter of electrolyte and a discharge density of about 306 W/L
Isn't the relevant measurement energy density (Wh/L) rather than power (W/L)? I guess there's some limit on the power generated by a given volume of the battery, but in practice it seems like the main question is how big the tank has to be per MWH/KWH, rather than how big the power module has to be to convert that back to energy over the duration of the discharge period.
> Liu and colleagues focused on redesigning the power module
A flow battery separates the power portion (the electronics, electrodes, pumps, etc) from the energy portion (tanks, fluid). Which is not so amazing for a car or a UPS where you want tens of minutes to a few hours of charge or discharge time, but is potentially great for grid use, where a discharge time of days to months is useful.
A zero-carbon northern Europe that replaced all gas heating with heat pumps would benefit from being able to store electricity during the warm summer months, to power heating in the cold winter months.
There are other options, of course - new nuclear plants, importing renewable power from countries with better weather, huge numbers of wind turbines, and so on - but cost-effective long-term power storage would address some issues if it was available.
How feasible is that at all? "According to Ofgem, the average household in the UK has 2.4 people living in it, and uses 8 kWh of electricity and 33 kWh of gas respectively, per day."
Lump those together, halve it for the magic of heat pumps but then add some back because winter will be above average use, call it 30kWh/day. Three months of winter is ~90 days, and ~30 million households, is storage of 30,000 x 90 x 30million = 81,000,000,000,000; eighty one trillion Watt-hours.
A classic (non-EV) car battery stores ~1kWh, so eighty one billion of them to store that kind of power. Thousands per household. Even to store ten percent of it is hundreds of car batteries per household which is still unfeasible, and not going to get you through winter.
That's exactly the appeal of flow batteries - for gigantic capacities, all you need is big tanks.
Working your example - google tells me that zinc-iodine electrolyte gets you about 200 Wh per liter. Therefore you need about 400 million cubic meters of storage for the capacity you suggest. To estimate the cost of this, I looked at reservoirs. The largest drinking reservoirs in the world are in Qatar, where they have built 5 tanks of 436,000 cubic meters each. Therefore we'd need about 200 of those facilities. The cost was around 5 billion dollars, so our total cost would be around a trillion dollars.
This is obviously a lot! But not unimaginable - the government borrowed over 300 billion pounds in the 2020 fiscal year alone just to pay for Covid. In practice you'd need considerably less than 90 days of continuous power, because the wind does blow and the sun does shine even in winter. All you really need is tanks to buffer the difference in renewable capacity between winter and summer, which is certainly not 100%. And the system can be built up incrementally over a long period of time, and still yield value - we don't need to spend a trillion dollars all at once. And in the worst case - you can erode the fraction of load taken on by renewables with nuclear (doesn't look so expensive now eh?).
Obviously take all these numbers with a grain of salt, this is a back-of-the-envelope calculation built on another back-of-the-envelope calculation (in particular, I haven't included the cost of the electrolyte). The point is merely to show that it's not orders of magnitude outside our ability.
But you did say Northern Europe, where our estimates are UK only; add another trillion for France, one for Germany, one for say Ireland+BeNeLux, another for Poland, another for NorthEast-Lithuania+Estonia+Belarus, one or two for Norway, Sweden, Finland... double it for the cost of the electrolyte, maintenance, the fact that building in Europe without slaves and with heavy regulation and expensive land is more expensive than Qatar...
World GDP is only around a hundred trillion, and we're talking of maybe ten trillion of it to build a heating system for Western Europe, for very little financial return for any investors.
Practically, we've been struggling to build one nuclear power plant (Hinkley C) for twenty years. I think it sounds like it is orders of magnitude outside our ability.
The times when there is insufficient wind and insufficient solar somewhere within transmission range of Europe are so small (hours) that this long term energy storage isn't something anyone is trying to build.
Better long distance transmission infrastructure is a much better solution to this.
There is a tradeoff between overprovisioning renewables, improving transmission networks and storage. Where the cheapest solution lies is not clear yet.
> A zero-carbon northern Europe that replaced all gas heating with heat pumps would benefit from being able to store electricity during the warm summer months, to power heating in the cold winter months.
Why store winter heat as work when you could just store it as heat or chemical energy?
All you need is a hole, some plastic sheeting, an element, and some pipes to store many GWh. Alternatively one of many cheap phase change materials, thermochemical stores, or some low grade sand unsuitable for construction.
The standard reply to any sort of gravity storage is "geography and land availability". I don't find that argument compelling enough to dismiss gravity storage outright, but I'll admit Oklahoma is pretty darn flat.
Chemical storage could be a big win when a mountain isn't readily available. Or the land is too expensive to use for power storage.
If the numbers work out (which, I suspect they don't), putting batteries at substations could provide continuous power to customers when the substation is isolated from the grid by a wiring fault. That shouldn't take months to fix, but sometimes it takes days (in my area, it's usually trees falling during storms, and the roads are dangerous during such times, so it takes some time for repairs). Might be nice anyway, and help with grid stabilization when the wiring is intact.
Why wouldn’t it be good for cars? It seems a fluid exchange could recharge the car, limited by how fast you can pump out the discharged fluid and pump in charged fluid.
I have no idea whether there are containment or environmental challenges that make this especially hard.
If one can actually make a useful economy out of replacing flow battery fluid at a station, sure. But I’m making a different point:
A Li-Ion battery can charge and discharge in something like an hour. If you double the number of cells in a battery or installation, you can store twice as much energy and you can draw twice as much power. (You don’t have to provision twice as much power circuitry, but you do need to purchase that extra power worth of electrodes in the cells.)
If you’re building something for which a roughly predetermined power to energy ratio (i.e. hours of use at a reasonable rate of discharge for the technology), this is fine. Similarly, if overprovisioning power or energy is not a problem for cost or weight, also fine.
But for grid use, wide differences in the duration of energy storage for different purposes can make sense. And a flow battery can separately provision power and energy. This gives a possible cost benefit to flow batteries.
It’s going to depend on the details. In a power substation space and weight are fairly flexible. In a vehicle they matter quite a bit. If you can build a flow battery that rivals solid state batteries for weight and volume, you’ve made an improvement because the fluid is swappable in ways that batteries are not. Batteries meant to move will move in a crash. Fixed batteries tend to stay put but complicate road trips.
In a UPS the tanks and valves and pumps are new points of failure, as the other responder states. In a car they are many times more complicated than electric vehicles, yes, but still less complicated than ICE vehicles by far. Your heater has more moving parts. Hell, the emissions control gear is probably more complex than the entire drivetrain of the electric vehicle.
That sounds like moving to a non solid state situation, right? One of the big benefits, imo, is removing as many moving parts from a car, not reintroducing them.
Being able to "refuel" quickly is a pretty big plus, so in the balance it could still be better to accept some moving parts in exchange for that.
And it's easy to imagine retrofitting a gas station to all of a sudden have charged electrolyte instead of gas, but I'm sure that has all sorts of additional complexities that I know nothing about... ;)
Surely it is more complicated. It may be able to serve the goal of eliminating fossil fuels from the car while not getting the full simplicity of (not really) solid state batteries we have today.
It would seemingly also allow you to carry around 50 miles of juice when you are running around town and bump up to 400 miles of juice when you are taking a road trip. This really only makes sense if the car is able to recharge the juice.
Maybe a new hybrid model (not gas electric hybrid) could emerge. The base (say 50 mile) capacity is solidish state like we have today and a flow battery range extender could be filled with fluid when the extended range is needed. This would make it so the car wouldn’t need to charge the fluid, if that helps.
Probably adds two low-pressure low-volume pumps. Which is more, but not a large increase in complexity for a car. The driver's seat probably has more moving parts.
It kinda depends to what power density it gets. Trading say 30% range for ability to refill the truck within minutes might just make enough sense to work. But if, say, electric truck gets enough range to run the full 9 hours (max allowed driving time per day in EU for truck drivers), then it doesn't matter as trucker can do "100% of their work", get to stop and leave it to charge for rest of the day.
For locomotives ? I'd imagine the simplest solution would be to have "battery wagon" ; get on the station, replace the battery wagon, and be on your merry way while it is recharging in the station waiting for next train to pick it up, at least for the long haul stuff. But capacity density still matters, if flow batteries are being close and cheaper then it makes sense, but if you need to pay slighty more per KWh but get 2x the capactity... thats 2x the range and less maintenance.
Or, you know, just electric rail. It already works fine in many places. I wonder if making some hybrid solution with electric rails also being covered by solar panels (basically so same maintenance crew can manage both) would make sense
So it all depends to what level of density it gets. If it is same capacity per kg but lower power there are still many places it can be used, if it is much lower it stops being sensible for moving stuff. And the price would need to be significantly below the normal batteries for anyone to even bother.
Trucks are weight limited with LFP, costs already favour electric even with NMC but the tradeoff is payload.
Trains maybe, but surely the money is better spent on overhead wire? Even if tunnels/bridges/etc. can't take it you're better with just the power-buffer battery and no flow battery.
Full electrification is expensive, but overhead wires where it doesn't require rebuilding anything isn't.
And rail is far cheaper to operate once built per unit capacity than trucking. If you don't inflate it with endless feasibility studies and contracts that get paid regardless of output the initial building costs are about double a 4 lane highway, but it carries a lot more and maintenance is lower.
Form Energy seems to be landing new pilot projects with US utilities. Form Energy is an American energy storage company focused on developing a new class of cost-effective, multi-day energy storage systems that will enable a reliable and fully-renewable electric grid year-round. Form Energy's first commercial product is a rechargeable iron-air battery capable of storing electricity for 100 hours at system costs competitive with legacy power plants. [1]
If you go to the source article, this is stated as:
>our SBMT cell shows peak charge and discharge power densities of 1,322 W/Lcell and 306.1 W/Lcell, respectively, compared with average charge and discharge power densities of <60 W/Lcell and 45 W/Lcell, respectively, of conventional planar flow battery cells.
So, it's not per volume of electrolyte, but per volume of the entire cell (housing included).
The article is about the size of the ion-exchange element, so I'd guess no, it's not supposed to be Wh/l.
If you want the storage density, you can look by the battery chemistry. But I'm not sure the article got this one right, or else the researchers didn't actually work on flow batteries and that part is only speculation.
(I know nothing about batteries or chemistry) I think this research only focuses on power generation, the device where you combine the liquids to get energy. Changing the energy density means changing the type of liquid, I assume, which this research is just not about.
I understand it as analogous to a ICE, where you have the fuel and the motor. But with flow batteries you can also go in reverse to create fuel from energy. The research featured here is about the motor but if you need a different energy density you have to change the type of fuel since that's how the energy is just stored in huge tanks.
People keep touting flow batteries over and over to the level it's started to feel like snake oil salesmen. I've heard the same story for many years now and they're still more expensive than standard lithium ion batteries, which only continue to get cheaper.
I'll believe it when someone actually produced one at cost efficient prices.
And 150 wh/kg sodium ion is entering mass production by CATL and Gotion. No lithium. $40-$60 / kwh expected.
And 200 wh/kg sodium ion is on the "roadmap" for the next few years. They've been generally about a year behind their roadmaps, but those projections aren't some pray-for-invention thing.
And sodium-sulfur? Hoo boy, if they get those going it's like 500 wh/kg, although last I saw they were using graphene to get the prototypes work, so we'll see.
Are other comments correct? $800/kwhr for flow batteries? Yikes.
> And 150 wh/kg sodium ion is entering mass production by CATL and Gotion. No lithium. $40-$60 / kwh expected.
Lithium is not the problem. There's plentiful lithium. And I'll believe the prices when they actually start selling it. I've heard "expected" prices many times before and they always turn out false.
Also still to be resolved is the lifetime of that kwh price. Again unproven with many wild claims.
Flow batteries are the thorium nuclear reactors of the battery world.
> And sodium-sulfur? Hoo boy, if they get those going it's like 500 wh/kg, although last I saw they were using graphene to get the prototypes work, so we'll see.
There's many magical claims in the world of batteries. Reserve your judgement until someone actually produces one. It's not just energy density but also power density and cell lifetime that needs to be considered.
Another one of these. Is this desperate astroturfing?
Sodium ion is going into production at CATL and Gotion. It's GOING to be in EVs. Sodium Ion is happening. 160 wh/kg, 3000-6000 cycles. Stable. Good temperature range. I don't know any other way to emphasize this.
This isn't a research paper, a clickbait headline. They are ramping up production for 2023. Not prototype cells looking for investors, etc. It's not a far flung announcement. This is "hey who wants to buy a shitton of these for a 300 mile range car?" call for sales.
And Lithium may be not really scarce, but you still need to find the sources, develop new sources, extract it, etc. Sodium is far more abundant than lithium. Like, 1000x more. As much as you want.
If it was January 2022 your comment would have weight. It doesn't now.
To emphasize, this means the 300 mile range (real not WLTP) sodium ion car that is fundamentally cheaper than an ICE. City cars for billions of people. No cobalt constraints, no nickel constraints, no waiting on lithium development. You're just waiting for the companies to make more production lines as fast as they can.
This is the beginning of the end for the ICE. There's no maybes or what-ifs or whatabout is there enough of this or child slave miners of that or we have to wait on South American government Z to allow Y.
Simply that this marks the point in history where you don't need to worry about feasibility of the switchover from ICE for 90% of commuter traffic. It's just a matter of time and scale, and ICE staring down the barrel of a drivetrain it can't economically compete with and still likely will drop another 50% in cost in the next ten years.
I'll be watching with interest to see what happens at Reliance in India, with Faradion's sodium-ion batteries.
India seems like an ideal market in that a cheap EV with a smallish sodium-ion battery represents a huge step up in mobility for many crores of Indian families. That's less true in Europe and North America.
Agreed, if your goal is the 150-200 mile city car (as in kei-car like compact car), and it's $40/kwhr, wow will those be cheap to make. The "pseudo rocket equation" of EVs comes into play: small car, smaller battery to get usable range.
So some behemoth Model S or X sized car in the US that needs a 100kwh pack to get 300+ miles needs 20kwh hours to get a kei car 150 miles.
What issue? Lots of us live in apartments in Norway and I see plenty of upgrades happening to get charging going at apartment complexes. Does not seem like an insurmountable problem. I got asked if I needed charging installed at my garage spot some years ago.
The issue that it is exceptionally rare in the US for apartments to have electric chargers. In my building there are two plug-in hybrid cars that are charged from 120 volt outlets. Type 2 chargers cost up to $7,000 to install and we would need many millions of them. Even if they are allowed to install one, few people are going to be willing to pay to install one in an apartment building they may leave soon. And having tens of cars charging at once will strain the electric system of the building.
One thing to remember is that “up to” means substantially less in cases like this. Suburban home chargers can be expensive because all of the major project costs are amortized over 1-2 vehicles and the homeowner has less experience negotiating. An apartment complex or parking garage is going to be easier across the board: one permit for the entire project, any electrical infrastructure upgrades are serving many customers on an existing high capacity line, the physical install’s overhead costs are amortized across many units and you’re getting wholesale rather than retail pricing on all of the parts.
Can easily be done with battery swapping stations, which are already a big thing in China.
There are a lot of low-cost vehicles there that are designed around battery swapping, and one luxury car maker, Nio, also offers it. Nio is setting up shop in Europe and already has swap stations in Norway where EV penetration is high.
No. We're not. We're talking about practical charging ability for people in apartments. If a government is too incompetent to enforce charger installation in indoor parking of rentals, light pole and meter charging is impossible, and adding 1kW of solar panels to the car itself isn't sufficient for daily use due to weather, then simply adding 2 3.5kWh battery slots in addition to whatever internal battery the car has is a trivial way of adding 70km of range that can be swapped at a moment's notice.
Your inability to imagine anything other than the laziest most spoiled american's habits (even when alternatives are easier) doesn't invalidate the huge space of other solutions.
If all of those don't work for some reason, then just treating it like an ICE and usingthe 250kW fast chager is only an extra 15 minutes once every week or two.
I, too, doubt that car companies would collaborate on their own. But this is a problem that California or the European Union could solve with the stroke of a pen.
You will, just not as a lump sum. A part of the battery's cost (1/2000 or 1/4000 or whatever) will be integrated into the battery swap charge.
This is how things work for poors. They don't have access to lots of credit, so a car that costs $15K less is good, and they are used to whatever a tank of gas costs, and will pay that. Again, this is the mass market, the next billion drivers/families. You're well down the income ladder at that point.
One option is changing the norm to charging during the day while people are at work and solar is at its peak. We are likely to have over-production in the future and all of those expensive batteries on wheels will be invaluable.
Garage operators would like to get more revenue for their existing buildings and it’s much less expensive if you’re not trying to build a couple hundred spot rapid-charging station to get everyone back on the road in 20 minutes - even a 110V plug would cover around half of the commuters in the United States working a standard 8 hour day, and you wouldn’t need anywhere near full capacity unless 100% of users lacked electrical hookups near their homes.
More importantly, this is the kind of thing which government funding could cover. Just the healthcare savings along from getting rid of ICEs would pay for a lot of it.
It's an extension cord and maybe a service upgrade. If they split the difference in cost between peak and offpeak power with the employee it will be a net profit in a few weeks.
Why would there need to be any type 2 chargers for this purpose? A third of the cars in the US being plugged in and at not-full charge can absorb 240GW from just wall outlets. This is close to double what the entire passenger fleet would neet as EVs.
Why not a company running the garage seeing it as a way of making money? Cheap solar should make it an attractive position to sell power during peak hours.
> Are other comments correct? $800/kwhr for flow batteries? Yikes.
No, this is completely uncompetitive, so batteries as costly as that would only be used for space applications, for which flow batteries are probably unsuited.
$800 per kW (not kWh) is plausible as a capital cost.
One reason to use flow batteries in grid applications is extremely long lifetime compared to Li-ion (tens of thousands of charge-discharge cycles, multiple decades of calendar life). Grid engineers are used to thinking in terms of the next forty years.
> They remain costly, though, with a capital cost of around US $800 per kilowatt-hour, more than twice that of lithium-ion batteries.
I was surprised by this! Since this is not commercialised on a broad scale, I would have thought that the cost is nowhere near competitive. Twice seems very close. How close are we to introducing flow-batteries at a competitive price?
> Liu estimates that the tubular design should cut the cost of flow-battery power modules by roughly half. Plus, all the components in the cell are off the shelf, and scaling up the reactor cell design should be easy, since it is based on a commonly used design in the chemical industry.
So if this research pans out it sounds like very close. This isn’t a new concept and it’s mature so the probability of continuing savings is less than traditional battery technologies (eg there’s new kinds of batteries coming out that are cheaper and more energy dense than lithium ion). However, at grid scale this may have additional advantages beyond pure cost that make it attractive still.
I can't imagine this is more mature then lithium ion batteries, or traditional batteries in general. They are everywhere in my apartment but afaik flow batteries are not used yet.
I agree, especially on the industrial design and manufacturing side. The concept has exited for ages, and I love decoupling power and energy density for all kinds of reasons (though I'm sure standard batteries are just tuned perfectly enough in large facilities that it's no big difference).
But the big cost reductions don't happen because an idea is mature, they occur because they're being produced at large enough scale that lots of people have spent time and energy on all of the thousand tiny things that individually reduce the cost. The stuff in this article is borderline just industrial design and they're talking a 3x change in footprint?
There has to be lots of other low hanging fruit... we're still improving lithium battery electrodes and each improvement really does improve them. The same will be true for flow batteries if they ever get made at enough scale.
Agreed. Lithium itself is 7x the low price it was 5 years ago. https://www.dailymetalprice.com/metalpricecharts.php?c=li&u=...
Emphasis on "more than". Lithium-ion batteries have been below $200 per kilowatt-hour for quite some time.
Basically the statement is lying through omission.
I find that number dubious, since the per-kWh cost of flow batteries should be low: just make the tanks larger.
It sounds like the energy capacity and power output can be scaled independently of one another. But as this article is meant for a wide audience, I think they simplified the discussion by making some assumptions about the desired power output per kWh stored.
Not unreasonable. The details are always in the research paper after all.
Your max power output probably doesn't go up ny "just making the tank larger"?
kWh does not measure max power, it measures capacity. A kWh is a constant factor multiple of Joules. I’d think you could absolutely make the capacity larger (ie store more energy) by just making the tanks larger. The flow rate is the thing that seems to determine the power output.
Yes, but I wasn't talking about capacity. I was talking about max output power.
Increasing the size of the tanks to increase the energy storage capacity, without increasing output power would be... useless.
Extreme example: a huge expensive 100 MWh battery that you can only draw a max power of 100 W from = useless.
I think it's actually closer to 4x as much. You can get about 4KWhs of LiPoFE4 for about $800. At least you could 2-3 years ago.
I recently got 7.4kWh at $160/kWh grade B cells for what it’s worth. Surely there are better deals out there, especially for used cells.
Even 4x as much is still way closer than what I've thought. This is not commercialised on a mass scale yet, but batteries are and have been for ages. Billions and billions of dollars got invested into cheaper, better and faster. Even 4x just seems right around the corner if you consider just how much work went into making batteries cheaper.
One thing highly appealing about flow batteries at scale is that the significantly simplify recycling of the critical materials. The electrolytes are inherently easily separable from the electrodes, anf retrievable in bulk. And you have significantly less material in the electrodes and reaction module, per kwh stored over lifecycle, making reclamation of those materials proportionally easier at scale.
Recycling of lithium ion batteries is not a major issue. There just hasn't been sufficient volume to justify a recycling business until very recently. Now there are numerous lithium ion battery recycling companies making hefty profits and growing rapidly.
> showed that the battery had a charge densities of about 1,322 watts per liter of electrolyte and a discharge density of about 306 W/L
Isn't the relevant measurement energy density (Wh/L) rather than power (W/L)? I guess there's some limit on the power generated by a given volume of the battery, but in practice it seems like the main question is how big the tank has to be per MWH/KWH, rather than how big the power module has to be to convert that back to energy over the duration of the discharge period.
No. From the article:
> Liu and colleagues focused on redesigning the power module
A flow battery separates the power portion (the electronics, electrodes, pumps, etc) from the energy portion (tanks, fluid). Which is not so amazing for a car or a UPS where you want tens of minutes to a few hours of charge or discharge time, but is potentially great for grid use, where a discharge time of days to months is useful.
> for grid use, where a discharge time of days to months is useful.
Not sure I know the use case for a duration of that length. It's possible today with pumped hydro, but I don't think it's used in that mode.
The DoE's "long duration storage earthshot" effort is loking for 10+ hours, which makes more sense: https://www.energy.gov/eere/long-duration-storage-shot
A zero-carbon northern Europe that replaced all gas heating with heat pumps would benefit from being able to store electricity during the warm summer months, to power heating in the cold winter months.
There are other options, of course - new nuclear plants, importing renewable power from countries with better weather, huge numbers of wind turbines, and so on - but cost-effective long-term power storage would address some issues if it was available.
How feasible is that at all? "According to Ofgem, the average household in the UK has 2.4 people living in it, and uses 8 kWh of electricity and 33 kWh of gas respectively, per day."
Lump those together, halve it for the magic of heat pumps but then add some back because winter will be above average use, call it 30kWh/day. Three months of winter is ~90 days, and ~30 million households, is storage of 30,000 x 90 x 30million = 81,000,000,000,000; eighty one trillion Watt-hours.
A classic (non-EV) car battery stores ~1kWh, so eighty one billion of them to store that kind of power. Thousands per household. Even to store ten percent of it is hundreds of car batteries per household which is still unfeasible, and not going to get you through winter.
That's exactly the appeal of flow batteries - for gigantic capacities, all you need is big tanks.
Working your example - google tells me that zinc-iodine electrolyte gets you about 200 Wh per liter. Therefore you need about 400 million cubic meters of storage for the capacity you suggest. To estimate the cost of this, I looked at reservoirs. The largest drinking reservoirs in the world are in Qatar, where they have built 5 tanks of 436,000 cubic meters each. Therefore we'd need about 200 of those facilities. The cost was around 5 billion dollars, so our total cost would be around a trillion dollars.
This is obviously a lot! But not unimaginable - the government borrowed over 300 billion pounds in the 2020 fiscal year alone just to pay for Covid. In practice you'd need considerably less than 90 days of continuous power, because the wind does blow and the sun does shine even in winter. All you really need is tanks to buffer the difference in renewable capacity between winter and summer, which is certainly not 100%. And the system can be built up incrementally over a long period of time, and still yield value - we don't need to spend a trillion dollars all at once. And in the worst case - you can erode the fraction of load taken on by renewables with nuclear (doesn't look so expensive now eh?).
Obviously take all these numbers with a grain of salt, this is a back-of-the-envelope calculation built on another back-of-the-envelope calculation (in particular, I haven't included the cost of the electrolyte). The point is merely to show that it's not orders of magnitude outside our ability.
But you did say Northern Europe, where our estimates are UK only; add another trillion for France, one for Germany, one for say Ireland+BeNeLux, another for Poland, another for NorthEast-Lithuania+Estonia+Belarus, one or two for Norway, Sweden, Finland... double it for the cost of the electrolyte, maintenance, the fact that building in Europe without slaves and with heavy regulation and expensive land is more expensive than Qatar...
World GDP is only around a hundred trillion, and we're talking of maybe ten trillion of it to build a heating system for Western Europe, for very little financial return for any investors.
Practically, we've been struggling to build one nuclear power plant (Hinkley C) for twenty years. I think it sounds like it is orders of magnitude outside our ability.
The times when there is insufficient wind and insufficient solar somewhere within transmission range of Europe are so small (hours) that this long term energy storage isn't something anyone is trying to build.
Better long distance transmission infrastructure is a much better solution to this.
There is a tradeoff between overprovisioning renewables, improving transmission networks and storage. Where the cheapest solution lies is not clear yet.
Until something adversarial happens to your transmission infrastructure similar to what happened to Nord Stream 1 and 2 a few months ago.
Yes, black swan events happen for all kind of power sources.
Depending on your risk tolerance you overbuild to reduce that. Same as with all types of energy production.
Winter happens at same time in Europe. Unless we're talking shipping all the way from Africa
Offshore wind is already at large scale in N. Europe and will continue to add much more capacity.
Winds are stronger in winter time.
Winter is excellent for wind power.
> A zero-carbon northern Europe that replaced all gas heating with heat pumps would benefit from being able to store electricity during the warm summer months, to power heating in the cold winter months.
Why store winter heat as work when you could just store it as heat or chemical energy?
All you need is a hole, some plastic sheeting, an element, and some pipes to store many GWh. Alternatively one of many cheap phase change materials, thermochemical stores, or some low grade sand unsuitable for construction.
The standard reply to any sort of gravity storage is "geography and land availability". I don't find that argument compelling enough to dismiss gravity storage outright, but I'll admit Oklahoma is pretty darn flat.
Chemical storage could be a big win when a mountain isn't readily available. Or the land is too expensive to use for power storage.
Decommissioned mines. Saw an article about it somewhere recently.
Really, you just need any elevation difference. I would imagine Oklahoma already builds water towers.
If the numbers work out (which, I suspect they don't), putting batteries at substations could provide continuous power to customers when the substation is isolated from the grid by a wiring fault. That shouldn't take months to fix, but sometimes it takes days (in my area, it's usually trees falling during storms, and the roads are dangerous during such times, so it takes some time for repairs). Might be nice anyway, and help with grid stabilization when the wiring is intact.
What about a couple days of overcast/rain (solar) or a couple days of stagnant air (wind) where storage would bridge the gap?
Why wouldn’t it be good for cars? It seems a fluid exchange could recharge the car, limited by how fast you can pump out the discharged fluid and pump in charged fluid.
I have no idea whether there are containment or environmental challenges that make this especially hard.
If one can actually make a useful economy out of replacing flow battery fluid at a station, sure. But I’m making a different point:
A Li-Ion battery can charge and discharge in something like an hour. If you double the number of cells in a battery or installation, you can store twice as much energy and you can draw twice as much power. (You don’t have to provision twice as much power circuitry, but you do need to purchase that extra power worth of electrodes in the cells.)
If you’re building something for which a roughly predetermined power to energy ratio (i.e. hours of use at a reasonable rate of discharge for the technology), this is fine. Similarly, if overprovisioning power or energy is not a problem for cost or weight, also fine.
But for grid use, wide differences in the duration of energy storage for different purposes can make sense. And a flow battery can separately provision power and energy. This gives a possible cost benefit to flow batteries.
It’s going to depend on the details. In a power substation space and weight are fairly flexible. In a vehicle they matter quite a bit. If you can build a flow battery that rivals solid state batteries for weight and volume, you’ve made an improvement because the fluid is swappable in ways that batteries are not. Batteries meant to move will move in a crash. Fixed batteries tend to stay put but complicate road trips.
In a UPS the tanks and valves and pumps are new points of failure, as the other responder states. In a car they are many times more complicated than electric vehicles, yes, but still less complicated than ICE vehicles by far. Your heater has more moving parts. Hell, the emissions control gear is probably more complex than the entire drivetrain of the electric vehicle.
That sounds like moving to a non solid state situation, right? One of the big benefits, imo, is removing as many moving parts from a car, not reintroducing them.
Being able to "refuel" quickly is a pretty big plus, so in the balance it could still be better to accept some moving parts in exchange for that.
And it's easy to imagine retrofitting a gas station to all of a sudden have charged electrolyte instead of gas, but I'm sure that has all sorts of additional complexities that I know nothing about... ;)
Surely it is more complicated. It may be able to serve the goal of eliminating fossil fuels from the car while not getting the full simplicity of (not really) solid state batteries we have today.
It would seemingly also allow you to carry around 50 miles of juice when you are running around town and bump up to 400 miles of juice when you are taking a road trip. This really only makes sense if the car is able to recharge the juice.
Maybe a new hybrid model (not gas electric hybrid) could emerge. The base (say 50 mile) capacity is solidish state like we have today and a flow battery range extender could be filled with fluid when the extended range is needed. This would make it so the car wouldn’t need to charge the fluid, if that helps.
I could see a hierarchy of power in a car, or truck/rv.
motor <-> lithium <-> flow battery
the low current from the flow battery could be continuously augmenting and replenishing the lithium ion battery
or even:
supercapacitor <-> lithium <-> flow battery
Probably adds two low-pressure low-volume pumps. Which is more, but not a large increase in complexity for a car. The driver's seat probably has more moving parts.
Flow batteries have way less current capacity so it could plainly not be powerful enough.
It also have lower energy density so you pumping 600l of new electrolyte on the station might still give you only 200km of range
Could it be good for a long-haul truck?
or maybe a locomotive, which is less sensitive to weight and cargo capacity?
It kinda depends to what power density it gets. Trading say 30% range for ability to refill the truck within minutes might just make enough sense to work. But if, say, electric truck gets enough range to run the full 9 hours (max allowed driving time per day in EU for truck drivers), then it doesn't matter as trucker can do "100% of their work", get to stop and leave it to charge for rest of the day.
For locomotives ? I'd imagine the simplest solution would be to have "battery wagon" ; get on the station, replace the battery wagon, and be on your merry way while it is recharging in the station waiting for next train to pick it up, at least for the long haul stuff. But capacity density still matters, if flow batteries are being close and cheaper then it makes sense, but if you need to pay slighty more per KWh but get 2x the capactity... thats 2x the range and less maintenance.
Or, you know, just electric rail. It already works fine in many places. I wonder if making some hybrid solution with electric rails also being covered by solar panels (basically so same maintenance crew can manage both) would make sense
So it all depends to what level of density it gets. If it is same capacity per kg but lower power there are still many places it can be used, if it is much lower it stops being sensible for moving stuff. And the price would need to be significantly below the normal batteries for anyone to even bother.
Trucks are weight limited with LFP, costs already favour electric even with NMC but the tradeoff is payload.
Trains maybe, but surely the money is better spent on overhead wire? Even if tunnels/bridges/etc. can't take it you're better with just the power-buffer battery and no flow battery.
Isn't the costs and recurring costs of railroad infrastructure orders of magnitude larger?
Full electrification is expensive, but overhead wires where it doesn't require rebuilding anything isn't.
And rail is far cheaper to operate once built per unit capacity than trucking. If you don't inflate it with endless feasibility studies and contracts that get paid regardless of output the initial building costs are about double a 4 lane highway, but it carries a lot more and maintenance is lower.
Form Energy seems to be landing new pilot projects with US utilities. Form Energy is an American energy storage company focused on developing a new class of cost-effective, multi-day energy storage systems that will enable a reliable and fully-renewable electric grid year-round. Form Energy's first commercial product is a rechargeable iron-air battery capable of storing electricity for 100 hours at system costs competitive with legacy power plants. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_Energy
If you go to the source article, this is stated as:
>our SBMT cell shows peak charge and discharge power densities of 1,322 W/Lcell and 306.1 W/Lcell, respectively, compared with average charge and discharge power densities of <60 W/Lcell and 45 W/Lcell, respectively, of conventional planar flow battery cells.
So, it's not per volume of electrolyte, but per volume of the entire cell (housing included).
The article is about the size of the ion-exchange element, so I'd guess no, it's not supposed to be Wh/l.
If you want the storage density, you can look by the battery chemistry. But I'm not sure the article got this one right, or else the researchers didn't actually work on flow batteries and that part is only speculation.
(I know nothing about batteries or chemistry) I think this research only focuses on power generation, the device where you combine the liquids to get energy. Changing the energy density means changing the type of liquid, I assume, which this research is just not about.
I understand it as analogous to a ICE, where you have the fuel and the motor. But with flow batteries you can also go in reverse to create fuel from energy. The research featured here is about the motor but if you need a different energy density you have to change the type of fuel since that's how the energy is just stored in huge tanks.
A smaller charger/discharger simply costs less which lets you buy more electrolyte. This is especially relevant for smaller installations.
People keep touting flow batteries over and over to the level it's started to feel like snake oil salesmen. I've heard the same story for many years now and they're still more expensive than standard lithium ion batteries, which only continue to get cheaper.
I'll believe it when someone actually produced one at cost efficient prices.
And 150 wh/kg sodium ion is entering mass production by CATL and Gotion. No lithium. $40-$60 / kwh expected.
And 200 wh/kg sodium ion is on the "roadmap" for the next few years. They've been generally about a year behind their roadmaps, but those projections aren't some pray-for-invention thing.
And sodium-sulfur? Hoo boy, if they get those going it's like 500 wh/kg, although last I saw they were using graphene to get the prototypes work, so we'll see.
Are other comments correct? $800/kwhr for flow batteries? Yikes.
> And 150 wh/kg sodium ion is entering mass production by CATL and Gotion. No lithium. $40-$60 / kwh expected.
Lithium is not the problem. There's plentiful lithium. And I'll believe the prices when they actually start selling it. I've heard "expected" prices many times before and they always turn out false.
Also still to be resolved is the lifetime of that kwh price. Again unproven with many wild claims.
Flow batteries are the thorium nuclear reactors of the battery world.
> And sodium-sulfur? Hoo boy, if they get those going it's like 500 wh/kg, although last I saw they were using graphene to get the prototypes work, so we'll see.
There's many magical claims in the world of batteries. Reserve your judgement until someone actually produces one. It's not just energy density but also power density and cell lifetime that needs to be considered.
Another one of these. Is this desperate astroturfing?
Sodium ion is going into production at CATL and Gotion. It's GOING to be in EVs. Sodium Ion is happening. 160 wh/kg, 3000-6000 cycles. Stable. Good temperature range. I don't know any other way to emphasize this.
https://www.catl.com/en/news/665.html
This isn't a research paper, a clickbait headline. They are ramping up production for 2023. Not prototype cells looking for investors, etc. It's not a far flung announcement. This is "hey who wants to buy a shitton of these for a 300 mile range car?" call for sales.
And Lithium may be not really scarce, but you still need to find the sources, develop new sources, extract it, etc. Sodium is far more abundant than lithium. Like, 1000x more. As much as you want.
If it was January 2022 your comment would have weight. It doesn't now.
To emphasize, this means the 300 mile range (real not WLTP) sodium ion car that is fundamentally cheaper than an ICE. City cars for billions of people. No cobalt constraints, no nickel constraints, no waiting on lithium development. You're just waiting for the companies to make more production lines as fast as they can.
This is the beginning of the end for the ICE. There's no maybes or what-ifs or whatabout is there enough of this or child slave miners of that or we have to wait on South American government Z to allow Y.
Simply that this marks the point in history where you don't need to worry about feasibility of the switchover from ICE for 90% of commuter traffic. It's just a matter of time and scale, and ICE staring down the barrel of a drivetrain it can't economically compete with and still likely will drop another 50% in cost in the next ten years.
I'll be watching with interest to see what happens at Reliance in India, with Faradion's sodium-ion batteries.
India seems like an ideal market in that a cheap EV with a smallish sodium-ion battery represents a huge step up in mobility for many crores of Indian families. That's less true in Europe and North America.
1. https://cen.acs.org/materials/energy-storage/Reliance-buys-s...
Agreed, if your goal is the 150-200 mile city car (as in kei-car like compact car), and it's $40/kwhr, wow will those be cheap to make. The "pseudo rocket equation" of EVs comes into play: small car, smaller battery to get usable range.
So some behemoth Model S or X sized car in the US that needs a 100kwh pack to get 300+ miles needs 20kwh hours to get a kei car 150 miles.
And of course e-bikes, e-mopeds, e-scooters, etc.
Outside of India, "crores" looks like a typo, rather than a quantifier.
Handy spoken shorthand for 10,000,000 though. And I was talking about intra-India events.
To really kill ICE you need to address the issue of charging in apartment buildings.
What issue? Lots of us live in apartments in Norway and I see plenty of upgrades happening to get charging going at apartment complexes. Does not seem like an insurmountable problem. I got asked if I needed charging installed at my garage spot some years ago.
The issue that it is exceptionally rare in the US for apartments to have electric chargers. In my building there are two plug-in hybrid cars that are charged from 120 volt outlets. Type 2 chargers cost up to $7,000 to install and we would need many millions of them. Even if they are allowed to install one, few people are going to be willing to pay to install one in an apartment building they may leave soon. And having tens of cars charging at once will strain the electric system of the building.
One thing to remember is that “up to” means substantially less in cases like this. Suburban home chargers can be expensive because all of the major project costs are amortized over 1-2 vehicles and the homeowner has less experience negotiating. An apartment complex or parking garage is going to be easier across the board: one permit for the entire project, any electrical infrastructure upgrades are serving many customers on an existing high capacity line, the physical install’s overhead costs are amortized across many units and you’re getting wholesale rather than retail pricing on all of the parts.
Can easily be done with battery swapping stations, which are already a big thing in China.
There are a lot of low-cost vehicles there that are designed around battery swapping, and one luxury car maker, Nio, also offers it. Nio is setting up shop in Europe and already has swap stations in Norway where EV penetration is high.
Will the batteries be interchangeable between different car brands? I doubt it.
Dozens of different makes and models already use the gogoro system. Most of the world isn't allergic to standardizing like the US.
We are talking about the huge 100+ range batteries like in Teslas. I really don't see these being practical to swap.
No. We're not. We're talking about practical charging ability for people in apartments. If a government is too incompetent to enforce charger installation in indoor parking of rentals, light pole and meter charging is impossible, and adding 1kW of solar panels to the car itself isn't sufficient for daily use due to weather, then simply adding 2 3.5kWh battery slots in addition to whatever internal battery the car has is a trivial way of adding 70km of range that can be swapped at a moment's notice.
Your inability to imagine anything other than the laziest most spoiled american's habits (even when alternatives are easier) doesn't invalidate the huge space of other solutions.
If all of those don't work for some reason, then just treating it like an ICE and usingthe 250kW fast chager is only an extra 15 minutes once every week or two.
Luxury car owners gonna lux. This is about cars for the mass market - "the next billion vehicles", as Ample says.
I, too, doubt that car companies would collaborate on their own. But this is a problem that California or the European Union could solve with the stroke of a pen.
So you will buy an expensive BEV and then throw away the new battery so you can play lottery with used ones. It is not appealing even to users.
You will buy a cheap EV, because the battery is not included in the price.
Who will be paying for them them?
You will, just not as a lump sum. A part of the battery's cost (1/2000 or 1/4000 or whatever) will be integrated into the battery swap charge.
This is how things work for poors. They don't have access to lots of credit, so a car that costs $15K less is good, and they are used to whatever a tank of gas costs, and will pay that. Again, this is the mass market, the next billion drivers/families. You're well down the income ladder at that point.
Ample is working with manufacturers
1. https://ample.com/
One option is changing the norm to charging during the day while people are at work and solar is at its peak. We are likely to have over-production in the future and all of those expensive batteries on wheels will be invaluable.
Why will companies want to install a charger for every employee? That is very expensive.
Garage operators would like to get more revenue for their existing buildings and it’s much less expensive if you’re not trying to build a couple hundred spot rapid-charging station to get everyone back on the road in 20 minutes - even a 110V plug would cover around half of the commuters in the United States working a standard 8 hour day, and you wouldn’t need anywhere near full capacity unless 100% of users lacked electrical hookups near their homes.
More importantly, this is the kind of thing which government funding could cover. Just the healthcare savings along from getting rid of ICEs would pay for a lot of it.
It's an extension cord and maybe a service upgrade. If they split the difference in cost between peak and offpeak power with the employee it will be a net profit in a few weeks.
Hundreds of type 2 chargers are far more than "an extension cord". It is millions of dollars.
Why would there need to be any type 2 chargers for this purpose? A third of the cars in the US being plugged in and at not-full charge can absorb 240GW from just wall outlets. This is close to double what the entire passenger fleet would neet as EVs.
Why not a company running the garage seeing it as a way of making money? Cheap solar should make it an attractive position to sell power during peak hours.
The conversation was about flow batteries. This doesn't look like a flow battery to me.
NGK has been selling sodium-sulfur batteries for stationary applications for years. In Europe NGK's NaS batteries are remarketed by BASF.
Although it is still early days, with less than a GW and a TWh total installed at customer sites.
Sodium-sulfur's advantage over lithium is long lifetime. (4500 cycles at 100% depth-of-discharge and at least 15 years calendar life claimed).
0. https://www.ngk-insulators.com/en/product/nas.html
1. https://www.energy-storage.news/ngks-nas-sodium-sulfur-grid-...
2. https://www.basf.com/global/en/media/news-releases/2019/11/p...
> Are other comments correct? $800/kwhr for flow batteries? Yikes.
No, this is completely uncompetitive, so batteries as costly as that would only be used for space applications, for which flow batteries are probably unsuited.
$800 per kW (not kWh) is plausible as a capital cost.
One reason to use flow batteries in grid applications is extremely long lifetime compared to Li-ion (tens of thousands of charge-discharge cycles, multiple decades of calendar life). Grid engineers are used to thinking in terms of the next forty years.