A recent report from Navigant Research analyzes the global market for next-generation advanced batteries, with a focus on the current leading battery chemistry, lithium ion, and the energy storage device types that might eventually replace it.
While lithium ion (Li-ion) batteries offer many advantages over traditional battery technologies, research and development of new battery chemistries that, in many ways, surpass Li-ion is advancing rapidly and is expected to have a major impact on the battery industry in the coming years. These new chemistries are anticipated to enable even more applications for batteries, thus increasing the overall size of the battery market. Click to tweet: According to a recent report from Navigant Research, the total worldwide capacity of advanced batteries is expected to grow from 30.4 megawatt-hours (MWh) in 2014 to more than 28,000 MWh in 2023.
“The limitations to Li-ion, including input costs, safety issues, and materials scarcity, could leave it vulnerable to new chemistries that solve some or all of those problems,” says Sam Jaffe, principal research analyst with Navigant Research. “Although most of the chemistries explored in this report are only at laboratory-scale production levels today, they could reshape the market for advanced batteries in the next 10 years.”
Important emerging battery chemistries include ultracapacitors, lithium sulfur, magnesium ion, solid electrolyte, next-generation flow, and metal-air. Their advent is occurring in the context of an enormous increase in the world’s appetite for advanced energy storage devices, according to the report: Navigant Research expects that overall battery demand is expected to increase from approximately 66.2 GWh in 2014 to greater than 225.3 GWh in 2023.
Is it a solar cell? Or a rechargeable battery? Actually, the patent-pending device invented at The Ohio State University is both: the world's first solar battery.
In the October 3, 2014 issue of the journal Nature Communications, the researchers report that they've succeeded in combining a battery and a solar cell into one hybrid device.
Key to the innovation is a mesh solar panel, which allows air to enter the battery, and a special process for transferring electrons between the solar panel and the battery electrode. Inside the device, light and oxygen enable different parts of the chemical reactions that charge the battery.
The university will license the solar battery to industry, where Yiying Wu, professor of chemistry and biochemistry at Ohio State, says it will help tame the costs of renewable energy.
"The state of the art is to use a solar panel to capture the light, and then use a cheap battery to store the energy," Wu said. "We've integrated both functions into one device. Any time you can do that, you reduce cost."
Scientists at Nanyang Technology University (NTU) in Singapore have developed ultra-fast charging batteries that can be recharged up to 70% in only two minutes.
The new generation batteries also have a long lifespan of over 20 years, more than 10 times compared to existing lithium-ion batteries.
This breakthrough has a wide-ranging impact on all industries, especially for electric vehicles, where consumers are put off by the long recharge times and its limited battery life.
With this new technology by NTU, drivers of electric vehicles could save tens of thousands on battery replacement costs and can recharge their cars in just a matter of minutes.
Commonly used in mobile phones, tablets, and in electric vehicles, rechargeable lithium-ion batteries usually last about 500 recharge cycles. This is equivalent to two to three years of typical use, with each cycle taking about two hours for the battery to be fully charged.
In the new NTU-developed battery, the traditional graphite used for the anode (negative pole) in lithium-ion batteries is replaced with a new gel material made from titanium dioxide.
Titanium dioxide is an abundant, cheap and safe material found in soil. It is commonly used as a food additive or in sunscreen lotions to absorb harmful ultraviolet rays.
The flow of analysis about battery storage from big-end investment banks continues apace. Last week it was HSBC and Citigroup with ground-breaking reports – which we wrote about here and here. UBS also jumped in on the act too.
Why is this so? Well, according to UBS, interest from both investors and corporates has accelerated in recent months. That’s because the big end of town is suddenly alive to the opportunities of a technology that will likely be even more disruptive than solar. And the key is in the forecast on costs.
So here are some highlights gleaned from the UBS discussion with Navigant:
Navigant estimates the cost of materials going into a battery at the Tesla Gigafactory on a processed chemical basis (not the raw ore) is $69/kWh [this metric is per kW per hour of operation].
The cost of the battery is only ~10-20% higher than the bill of materials – suggesting a potential long-term competitive price for Lithium Ion batteries could approach ~$100 per kWh. Tesla currently pays Panasonic $180/kW for their batteries, although conventional systems still selling for $500-700/kWh. But Navigant says that the broader market place will reach the levels Tesla is paying in the next two to three years.
A typical ‘load shifting’ 4-hour battery (designed to address the afternoon/evening peak) costs anywhere from ~$720-2,800/kWh, depending entirely on the scale of the Lithium Ion battery employed and the size of order.
The average $500-700/kWh for a typical battery is probably closer to the $2,000-3,000/kW when including the balance of the system costs ( around $400-500/kW), with a trend towards around $1,500/kW within the next 3-years. Navigant estimates the global market for batteries will grow from 400 MWh in 2013 (ie – 100 MW assuming 4-hour systems), to 20GWh (or around 5GW/yr) by 2020, globally.
Jostein Eikeland, a Norwegian entrepreneur with a mixed record of success, is hoping to jolt the world of energy storage.
On Tuesday, Eikeland's latest venture, Alevo, will unveil a battery that he says will last longer and ultimately cost far less than rival technologies.
The technology, which is meant to store excess electricity generated by power plants, has been developed by Eikeland in secret for a decade.
"We've been very stealth," Eikeland said in a telephone interview. "We didn't know if we were going to succeed."
Martigny, Switzerland-based Alevo Group is gearing up to start manufacturing batteries next year at a massive former cigarette plant near Charlotte, North Carolina, that it says will employ 2,500 people within three years.
Eikeland, 46, said Alevo, named for the inventor of the battery, Alessandro Volta, has $1 billion from anonymous Swiss investors and has taken no state funding or incentives.
The batteries use lithium iron phosphate and graphite as active materials and an inorganic electrolyte - what Eikeland called the company's "secret sauce" - that extends longevity and reduces the risk of burning. They can be charged and discharged over 40,000 times, the company said.
That is about four times as much as rival batteries, said Sam Wilkinson, who follows energy storage for IHS Technology. Wilkinson, who said he was briefed by Alevo on its plans, said that if the batteries work as promised they will constitute a technological leap.
Graeme wrote:Stealthy Norwegian entrepreneur aims to revolutionize U.S. energy storageJostein Eikeland, a Norwegian entrepreneur with a mixed record of success, is hoping to jolt the world of energy storage.
On Tuesday, Eikeland's latest venture, Alevo, will unveil a battery that he says will last longer and ultimately cost far less than rival technologies.
The technology, which is meant to store excess electricity generated by power plants, has been developed by Eikeland in secret for a decade.
"We've been very stealth," Eikeland said in a telephone interview. "We didn't know if we were going to succeed."
Martigny, Switzerland-based Alevo Group is gearing up to start manufacturing batteries next year at a massive former cigarette plant near Charlotte, North Carolina, that it says will employ 2,500 people within three years.
Eikeland, 46, said Alevo, named for the inventor of the battery, Alessandro Volta, has $1 billion from anonymous Swiss investors and has taken no state funding or incentives.
The batteries use lithium iron phosphate and graphite as active materials and an inorganic electrolyte - what Eikeland called the company's "secret sauce" - that extends longevity and reduces the risk of burning. They can be charged and discharged over 40,000 times, the company said.
That is about four times as much as rival batteries, said Sam Wilkinson, who follows energy storage for IHS Technology. Wilkinson, who said he was briefed by Alevo on its plans, said that if the batteries work as promised they will constitute a technological leap.
reuters
Alternative energy cannot take over from fossil fuels without a way to bridge over the peaks and troughs that can occur when the wind fades or the sun dips. That's what gets us so excited about advances in grid scale batteries.
In the most recent breakthrough, the good folk at the Fraunhofer institute in Magdeburg, Germany, have risked taking their own facility off the power grid, leaving their many sensitive experiments at the mercy of a megabattery to prove the concept.
© Fraunhofer IFF / Viktoria Kühne
Alternative energy cannot take over from fossil fuels without a way to bridge over the peaks and troughs that can occur when the wind fades or the sun dips. That's what gets us so excited about advances in grid scale batteries.
In the most recent breakthrough, the good folk at the Fraunhofer institute in Magdeburg, Germany, have risked taking their own facility off the power grid, leaving their many sensitive experiments at the mercy of a megabattery to prove the concept.
© Fraunhofer IFF / René Maresch
In Germany, where solar power supply has set records fulfilling over 50% of the total electricity demand, the technology cannot come too soon. After all, if you obtain 5% of your electricity from solar, and the supply dips by 50%, the grid can easily redistribute to cover the small hiccup. But when 50% of electricity drops by half...well, that is where the vision and reality meet on the battlefield of progress.
The mobile 1-Megawatt battery with a capacity of 0.5 Megawatt-hours consists of approximately 5000 lithium ion cells packed into a container the size of a rail car. The firm SK Innovation, part of Korea's third-largest conglomerate, SK Group, built the megabattery.
The megabattery can serve a single or several large production facilities (equivalent to 100 households), which could be useful to replace the many stand-alone generators that still serve to ensure stability in production facilities throughout the developing world.
More importantly, the megabattery can be integrated into regional power supply networks as well. The optimization of regional energy management remains the current focus at the Fraunhofer IFF: the megabattery is being tested with the micro-Smart-Grid to help with the development of software and control systems to manage the networks of tomorrow.
careinke wrote:Graeme wrote:The batteries use lithium iron phosphate and graphite as active materials and an inorganic electrolyte - what Eikeland called the company's "secret sauce" - that extends longevity and reduces the risk of burning. They can be charged and discharged over 40,000 times, the company said.
reuters
Hmmm secret research, "secret sauce", mixed record of success, is anyone else smelling a scam here????
The electrolyte appears to be lithium aluminium chloride (LiAlCl4) dissolved in liquid sulphur dioxide (SO2). SO2 isn't flammable like the organic carbonate solvents normally used in Li-ion batteries, but with a boiling point of -10C it must be under pressure in the cells. SO2 is extremely pungent, toxic, severely affects the respiratory system and is, of course, the cause of "acid rain." Let's hope its containment in the cells is foolproof, otherwise we have yet another hazard on our hands. What a pest chemistry can be! Why can't there be a nice suitable & innocuous solvent available?
A new battery that promises to solve two of the biggest grumbles about electric cars - high prices and low driving ranges - is headed for shop floors in just over a year.
The lithium battery, which experts say could be a game-changing “killer app” for the global car market, can triple the driving range of an electric vehicle and significantly lower its costs, say the US scientists who developed it.
It can also double the running life of a smartphone or a laptop, said Dr Qichao Hu, who developed the device with his former professor, Donald Sadoway, a prominent battery expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
But its impact on the cost and performance of an electric car could prove transformational, said Prof Sadoway, whose work on other batteries has been backed by Microsoft co-founder, Bill Gates.
Independent experts in the US recently confirmed prototype cells in the battery developed by Dr Hu and Prof Sadoway can store more than twice as much energy as conventional cells.
The main difference between their battery and existing ones is that it has an ultra-thin metal anode with higher energy density than the graphite and silicon anodes in current batteries, and uses safer electrolyte material.
Dr Hu founded a company called SolidEnergy in 2012, just outside Boston, to commercialise the technology and hopes the battery will be in production for consumer electronics in the first half of 2016 and in electric cars by the second half of that year.
AQUION ENERGY AHI TECHNOLOGYStationary batteries can store surplus wind and solar energy, turning a highly variable power source into a steady flow of electrons. But most are made from highly toxic or flammable materials. The Aqueous Hybrid Ion (AHI) battery relies on a salt water–based electrolyte to carry the charge. It’s nontoxic, low-cost, and modular, and it can’t overheat. It has a long life cycle and a high capacity. And it can be scaled for home use or the grid. In other words, it’s basically everything today’s batteries are not.
Sodium-ion batterySodium-ion batteries are a type of reusable battery that uses sodium-ions as its charge carriers. The sodium salts used to prepare these battery materials are highly abundant, coming from more renewable sources than those of equivalent lithium salts, making them both cheap and easily obtainable. This type of battery is in a developmental phase, but may prove to be a cheaper way to store energy than commonly used lithium-ion batteries. As of 2014, one company, Aquion Energy, has a commercially available sodium-ion battery with cost/kWh capacity similar to a nickel-iron battery. In addition UK-based Faradion has developed a wide range of novel, low-cost Sodium-ion materials, which are a drop-in replacement for established Lithium-ion technology and which they are now licensing. Unlike sodium-sulfur batteries, sodium ion batteries can be made portable and can function at room temperature (approx. 25˚C). Sodium-ion also offers enhanced safety and transportation features, particularly over lithium-ion.
Aquion M100-L082 Battery Module
Energy 25.5 kWh
Maxium Current: 144 A
Continuous Power: 4.3 kW
Cycle Life >3,000 cycles, 100% depth of discharge
Size: 46" x 52" x 40"
We created unique interconnected partially graphitic carbon nanosheets (10-30 nm in thickness) with high specific surface area (up to 2287 m2 g-1), significant volume fraction of mesoporosity (up to 58%), and good electrical conductivity (211-226 S m-1) from hemp bast fiber. The nanosheets are ideally suited for low (down to 0 °C) through high (100 °C) temperature ionic-liquid-based supercapacitor applications: At 0 °C and a current density of 10 A g-1, the electrode maintains a remarkable capacitance of 106 F g-1. At 20, 60, and 100 °C and an extreme current density of 100 A g-1, there is excellent capacitance retention (72-92%) with the specific capacitances being 113, 144, and 142 F g-1, respectively. These characteristics favorably place the materials on a Ragone chart providing among the best power-energy characteristics (on an active mass normalized basis) ever reported for an electrochemical capacitor: At a very high power density of 20 kW kg-1 and 20, 60, and 100 °C, the energy densities are 19, 34, and 40 Wh kg-1, respectively. Moreover the assembled supercapacitor device yields a maximum energy density of 12 Wh kg-1, which is higher than that of commercially available supercapacitors. By taking advantage of the complex multilayered structure of a hemp bast fiber precursor, such exquisite carbons were able to be achieved by simple hydrothermal carbonization combined with activation. This novel precursor-synthesis route presents a great potential for facile large-scale production of high-performance carbons for a variety of diverse applications including energy storage.
Sodium-ion batteries offer an attractive alternative to Li-ion batteries not because they outperform Li-ion batteries, but mainly because of lower costs due to the the nearly unlimited supply of sodium. They are also an attractive alternative in part because unlike their sodium-sulfur battery cousins they can be made in similar sizes to Li-ion batteries.
However, the commercial development of sodium-ion batteries has been hampered by the materials used in the negative electrodes. These swell to as much as 400 to 500 percent their original size, leading to mechanical damage and loss of electrical contact.
Now researchers at Kansas State University have developed a composite, paper-like material made from two 2-dimensional materials—molybdenum disulfide and graphene nanosheets—that has been shown to overcome this shortcoming.
In research published in the journal ACS Nano (“MoS2/Graphene Composite Paper for Sodium-Ion Battery Electrodes”), the 2-D composite material developed proved resistant to the “alloying” reaction that electrode materials typically suffer when in contact with sodium.
pstarr wrote:Why hemp? Why not oats or corn or mulberry bushes? I see no mention of what makes hemp special, the alkaloids (thc) or the lipids. If it is only the cellulose in the bast fiber that is "carbonized" then what difference does it make?
pstarr wrote:Why hemp?
Imagine an electric car with the range of a Tesla Model S -- able to reach Lake Tahoe from the Bay Area on a single charge -- but at one-fifth the $70,000 price tag for the luxury sedan.
Or a battery not only able to provide many times more energy than today's technology but also at significantly cheaper prices, meaning longer-lasting and less expensive power for cellphones, laptops and even the home.
Those are among the ambitious goals of the $120 million, Department of Energy-funded Joint Center for Energy Storage Research, a 14-member partnership led by Argonne National Laboratory and including Lawrence Berkeley Lab, Sandia National Laboratories and a host of universities and private companies. In January, the center's Berkeley hub is moving into the lab's new $54 million General Purpose Laboratory, bringing its battery scientists, chemists and engineers together under one roof for the first time.
The team, headed by JCESR deputy director Venkat Srinivasan, aims to achieve revolutionary advances in battery performance -- creating devices with up to five times the energy capacity of today's batteries at one-fifth the cost by 2017.
To accomplish the feat, Srinivasan is looking to replace the current standard-bearer for rechargeable batteries -- lithium-ion -- with batteries made of cheaper, more durable materials, including magnesium, aluminum and calcium.
"We want to go beyond and find the next generation of technology," Srinivasan said. "It's clear to us that the batteries we have today are not meeting the needs."
pstarr wrote:Why hemp? Why not oats or corn or mulberry bushes? I see no mention of what makes hemp special, the alkaloids (thc) or the lipids. If it is only the cellulose in the bast fiber that is "carbonized" then what difference does it make?
Move over graphene, we’re looking at the next nanomaterial of the new millennium. That would be the super-miniscule wood fibers known as nanocellulose, and the South African company Sappi is already moving forward with plans for a pilot-scale plant to demonstrate a new method for prying the little guys loose from wood.
If the project is successful, you’re going to see nanocellulose working its way into all kinds of clean tech applications — maybe not quite as many as graphene, but we’re thinking EV batteries for starters.
So…What Is This Nanocellulose You Speak Of?
We must have been asleep at the wheel because this stuff is new to our radar, but the US Department of Agriculture is all over nanocellulose like white on rice. Here’s why:
Nanocellulose is simply wood fiber broken down to the nanoscale…Materials at this minute scale have unique properties; nanocellulose-based materials can be stronger than Kevlar fiber and provide high strength properties with low weight. These attributes have attracted the interest of the Department of Defense for use in lightweight armor and ballistic glass.
USDA also cites interest from the private sector for automotive and electronics applications among many other fields.
In fact, USDA is so excited about nanocellulose that is kicked in for a nifty little video produced by TAPPI (the Technological Association of the American Pulp and Paper Industry — start at the 2:15 mark to skip the fluff and cut to the mustard):
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