One of the great underappreciated issues of renewable energy isn't whether seagulls are banging into turbine blades. It's whether intermittent sources of power have any real value in a world without energy storage.
But that won't be as big an issue if a new battery technology finds its way to the market. The battery, developed by a startup called Liquid Metal Battery Corp. (LMBC), could serve as a form of storage for everything from electric utilities down to single-family homes and virtually everything in between. Moreover, it has significant investors behind it, including Bill Gates.
The grid storage battery uses a high-density electrode on the bottom (red), a molten salt electrolyte (yellow),
and a low-density liquid metal (green) at the top.
Source: Liquid Metal Battery Corp.
"People love renewables," the company's founder, Donald Sadoway, who is also the John F. Elliott Professor of Materials Chemistry at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told us in an interview. "They love solar. They love wind. But both of those technologies are intermittent. And we don't need intermittent boosting of the grid. We need reliable power."
Sadoway's idea is to build "a honkin' big battery" -- a unit as large as 1,000 cubic feet that uses hundreds of cells, each the size of a pizza box. The battery's advantages are that it is cheap, can be made big, and offers high energy density. Ultimately, the company believes such a battery could fill the storage role if it drops its cost to $100/kWh, but Sadoway and the company's executives are not saying what their battery costs today.
"Our batteries will be big, and we'll get economies of scale from that size," newly appointed CEO Phil Giudice told Design News. "And if we can provide cost-effective storage, we could have thousands of these being used by a single big utility."
Apparently, important people agree with that vision. Gates, who had reportedly seen some of Sadoway's online lectures at MIT, is one of two major investors in the company. The other investor is the French firm Total Group, which describes itself as a multinational energy conglomerate with 96,000 employees.
Gates has been open about his reasons for supporting the startup. Without inexpensive storage, "renewable energy sources like wind turbines and solar cells will never approach the scale or affordability that is necessary," he wrote in a Web article titled "We Need a Battery Miracle."
The reason storage is so important is extraordinarily simple but often ignored. Wind turbines generate power only when the wind blows, and solar cells make power only when the sun is shining brightly. Like all other sources of power -- coal, hydro, nuclear -- the electrical current from wind and solar sources must be used instantly. With a few minor exceptions, such as pumped hydro and compressed air energy storage, utilities have few ways of storing electricity for later use.
Mechanical failure of a rotating mass, or the bearing system results in a runaway huge chuck of metal. Rotating machinery is tested in test beds lined in 1-3 ft of concrete to "catch" a failed rotor.
"That's just my opinion, I could be wrong." -Dennis Miller, "The Rants"
Maybe the technology that he SHOULD be funding is the next generation of computer operating systems that perform correctly ALL THE TIME. Here's a novel thought. He could invent a multitasking system and name it DOORS 3.2, since someone else has already trademarked the WINDOWS moniker!!!!! Or, how about OS/2.2? That's another catchy name..........
I attended yesterday the MIT Enterprise Forum at South Florida and one of the speakers actually talked about fly wheel technology. His company is PowerTree.
Porsche actually has a racecar with this technology, but I am thinking more along the lines of stationary applications to store the energy from such intermittant sources as solar and wind. A primer...
OK, i'll say it again, energy storage via kinetic energy, not hydro but flywheels. Direct conversion of electricity, both in and out, at high effeciency, small footprint, near zero environmental impact, scalable. Why is everyone so fixated on yet-to-be-discovered battery improvements and ignoring this mature techmology? Even it it is used as a bridge solution it is affordable and implementable right now.
I understand the "Mister Monopolizer" moniker, but I have to give Gates credit on this: It's one of five battery start-ups that he's funding. Development of battery technology is difficult at best, with serious doubt as to any payoff in the long run. If it works, we're all the better for it in the end.
In response to the suggestion of using pumped storage, it is expensive and not that efficient, and it requires a whole lot of land, plus it could have a huge environmental impact. Other than those problems, it may be OK.
Seeing " Mister Monopolizer" funding any potentially crucial development is cause for concern.
The biggest challenge related to liquid metal batteries is keeping them hot, because it would require a lot of power just to do that, unless the battery uses mercury, in which case the howel from the safety people will be quite loud.
What about the polystyrene battery that I read about being developed, which is supposedly ten times better .
Dr Xie Xian Ning from the National University of Singapore's Nanoscience and Nanotechnology Initiative and his team developed the soft, foldable membrane using a polystyrene-based polymer. When sandwiched between two charged metal plates it can store charge at 0.2 farads per square centimetre, which is claimed to be well above the typical upper limit for a standard capacitor.
Most polystyrene plastics are not very toxic, as well as not very expensive. Those are two valuable characteristics to have in a bettery. At this point it would be worthwhile to have more people investigating that approach.
Of course we must make sure that some patent troll does not get hold of the patent. Perhaps I am being a bit ahead of things with that thought, but maybe not.
To DougISanDiego: You're right -- the technique you describe is pumped hydro, and it is currently the largest form of storage that we have (albeit, we have very little storage). The problem with pumped hydro is that it takes up large chunks of land -- too large, I'm told, to be seriously considered as a large-scale solution. It's a case of counties not wanting it in their backyards.
First of all, let me state that I'm an electrical engineer, so all the discussion about this chemistry and that chemistry pretty much goes over my head. To me, most of these battery technologies sounds dangerous, difficult to control, and inefficient - and with a short life span to boot.
Why don't we consider using one of the oldest 'battery' technologies around: reservoirs? Use the excess energy from the renewable sources to pump water up the mountain to the upper reservoir. When the energy is needed, let the water flow down to the lower reservoir while spinning the turbines on the way down.
Are batteries significanly more efficient than reservoirs? Water reservoirs are certainly more safe, last longer, and other than the small amount that evaporates or seeps into the ground, the energy stored in a reservoir has a very long 'shelf life'. Of course, there are other benefits to water reservoirs - they can be great sources of recreational activity too.
A new book by Thomas Edison's great-grandniece takes on the notion that he was a lone-wolf inventor and replaces it with an image of a man who ascribed great value to the ideas of colleagues.
In response to rising interest in autonomous vehicles, the federal government has called upon states not to authorize operation of self-driving cars, except for the purpose of testing.
With LEDs dropping in price virtually every year, automakers have begun employing them, not only on luxury vehicles, but on entry-level models, as well.
Using almost 200 light-emitting diodes in the front and back of the new 2014 CTS, Cadillac designers are showing how LEDs can change the character of a vehicle.
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