I have quite the backlog of (flow) battery articles and energy storage-related posts to get through. I won’t be diving particularly deep on any of these pieces for the moment, and will try to go, roughly, chronologically. Mostly I want to stay informed on the field and get a reality check on what other people are working on relative to us at https://fbrc.dev/ (which is very much in its infancy).
“Real innovation vs Silicon Valley nonsense”
A post a while back from Cory Doctorow got me thinking: [1]
If there was any area where we needed a lot of “innovation,” it’s in climate tech. We’ve already blown through numerous points-of-no-return for a habitable Earth, and the pace is accelerating.
Silicon Valley claims to be the epicenter of American innovation, but what passes for innovation in Silicon Valley is some combination of nonsense, climate-wrecking tech, and climate-wrecking nonsense tech.
Doctorow then summarizes the latest crypto, AI, NFT-style scams, and transitions to more developments in climate tech.
In other words, climate tech is unselfish tech. It’s a gift to the future and to the broad public. It shares its spoils with workers. It requires public action. By contrast, Silicon Valley is greedy tech that is relentlessly focused on the shortest-term returns that can be extracted with the least share going to labor. It also requires massive public investment, but it also totally committed to giving as little back to the public as is possible.
I stress, however, that a large portion of climate tech comes from the exact same Silicon Valley mindset as crypto and NFTs, and this overlap is large enough to be a problem. Just by virtue of being climate tech, does not make a technology immune to the ills of venture capitalists. Doctorow realizes this, and
If Silicon Valley produces nothing but planet-wrecking nonsense, grifty scams, and planet-wrecking, nonsensical scams, then these are all features of the tech sector, not bugs.
…
These are the questions that we should be concerning ourselves with: what behavioral changes will allow us to realize cheap, abundant, green energy? What “innovations” will our society need to focus on the things we need, rather than the scams and nonsense that creates Silicon Valley fortunes?
Some Silicon Valley nonsense: Energy Vault
At some point I might do a whole post on Energy Vault, because they epitomize the climate tech/silly-con valley grift. This video summarizes some of the reasons non-hydro gravity energy storage does not pencil out [2]. The company has since pivoted to selling regular ol’ lithium-ion systems in Western markets, but has recently commissioned a project in China [3,4].
I don’t really think covering Energy Vault is a good use of time or resources though.
ESS, all-iron flow battery company still kicking
1MW/8MWh from Nigerian power producer , and 3.6 MW, “8-hour” (28.8 MWh) project with Sacramento Municipal Utility District [5,6]. This latter opportunity hast the potential to go up to 200 MW/2 GWh (!), however, which I can’t recall ESS having demonstrated before.
Last September, the company completed commissioning of six Energy Warehouse systems delivered to SMUD. The existing 450 kW / 2,400 kWh Energy Warehouse system at SMUD’s Sacramento Power Academy continues to provide SMUD and ESS with insights through risk and benefits analysis, use case studies, and performance testing.
…
Over the the past year, ESS has reported progress in enhancing its system design and scaling its manufacturing in the US. It said it has reduced the cost of building an Energy Warehouse by nearly 60% and the overall build cycle time by 73%, as well as boosted energy density by 25%. The company has also earned certifications including UL 1973, UL 9540A, and IEEE 693 and commissioned its first fully automated production line.
Can’t find the source on when 2 GWh would potentially show up.
Ambri, liquid metal battery, bankrupts and gets bought
Ambri, the liquid metal battery startup founded in 2010 to commercialize tech from MIT Prof. Donald Sadoway, went bankrupt earlier this year [7]. Recently, it’s been purchased [8].
Here is their chemistry from their website: [9]
They claim to be offering 1 MWh containerized units (vs. the 5 MWh 20-ft containers common in Li-ion now), lower cost per MWh than Li-ion, 20-year life and tens of thousands of cycles without degradation.
I’m curious about the cost/sustainability of antimony, it is in yellow on the EuChemS Periodic Table. Also, high-temperature operation, and gasketing, are no joke. Curious how Ambri will proceed post-bankruptcy.
Reversible solid oxide fuel cell for a CO2 flow battery?
I missed Noon Energy before [10].
At its core, both MOXIE and Noon use a type of reversible fuel cell. Depending on the direction of the reaction, it’s called a solid oxide fuel cell or solid oxide electrolyzer.
In Noon’s version, the battery starts off with a full tank of carbon dioxide. Perhaps counterintuitively, this is the discharged state. To charge the battery, electricity flows through the battery, performing two chemical reactions. In one, it turns carbon dioxide into oxygen and carbon monoxide. The second reaction, known as the Boudouard reaction, strips the oxygen atom from carbon monoxide, leaving oxygen, which is exhausted, and solid carbon, which is stored. The second reaction gives off heat and the first reaction absorbs it, so after the initial startup, the system is neatly balanced.
To discharge the battery, the same reactions are run in reverse: Oxygen is drawn in from the atmosphere and carbon is withdrawn from storage. The electricity that results from the reactions gets sent to the grid (or wherever else it’s to be used), and the carbon dioxide gets stored in the tank.
I have lots of questions, especially related to managing solid carbon deposition (Boudouard reaction) reversibly, long-term, and at scale. Also, on round-trip efficiency, given I have not seen very high efficiencies one-way for CO2 electrolysis to CO, to suggest it could be used in a reversible system.
This sounds just like a system with a reversible fuel cell/electrolyser, that produces, stores, then re-oxidizes gaseous hydrogen. Solid carbon is certainly easier to store than hydrogen. But pure CO2 is harder to store than water (the discharge product of a hydrogen-air fuel cell), and water electrolysis to hydrogen is way more advanced than CO2 electrolysis. And reversible hydrogen fuel cells don’t even make sense normally for energy storage applications.
References
Citation
@online{pollard_smith2024,
author = {Pollard Smith, Kirk},
title = {The {Flowdown} \#3},
date = {2024-09-01},
url = {https://dualpower.supply/posts/flowdown-3/},
langid = {en}
}