Apparently, this company (EOS) has overcome the recharge limitation that exists in conventional zinc-air batteries, and supposedly has several patents on the technology. If true, this technology would be a big boost for all sorts of battery powered technology, not just grid storage. The big question: what is the conversion efficiency? – Anthony
Guest post by Mathias Aarre Mæhlum
In the next few years, an increasing amount of wind turbines and solar panels is expected to be built all around the world, reducing the stress that coal, fossil fuels and other polluting methods of harnessing energy does on our environment.
There are several challenges related to the electrical grid we face when solar, wind and other renewable energy sources reaches 10, 15 and 20% of the total useful energy generated. This article focuses solely on energy storage. Why is energy storage important?
Wind and solar energy (other renewable energy sources as well) are highly fluctuating. We are having a hard time predicting the flow of the energy resulting in two main problems:
How can we assure that we have enough energy to satisfy the rate of consumption? Imagine days where the amount of energy harnessed does not reach the demand. Or if we flip the coin, days where we generate too much electricity and want to store the surplus for times when energy is scarce.
A stable flow of energy is also important. If we are to exchange our current base load energy systems with renewable energy sources, we need some kind of device between the electricity generation and consumer, ensuring a stable and controllable flow.
Batteries have previously not been applicable for utility-scale energy storage. There are several reasons for this, but most important is the price tag. In the last ten years, technological advancements have been made in a battery that utilizes zinc and air as reactants. The key here is that the air comes from the outside rather than acting as a reactant within the battery.
This result in one very interesting thing: Since there is only one reactant in the battery itself, we can expect an increased energy density. In theory, this can be up to ten times the density of ion-lithium batteries. In addition to this, zinc-air batteries are expected to have a lifetime of 30 years. This things all help with lowering the costs, allowing us to use the technology on larger scale.
It looks like zinc-air batteries on utility-scale could be a valuable addition to our renewable energy systems and help us transition towards the smart grid. The first utility-scale zinc-air batteries are promised to be on the market within 2013:
Reblogged this on pindanpost.
Oh, noes! They’re gonna suck up all our oxygen to make power! (I can’t wait to hear someone say that).
Any idea of the amount of Zinc at $2,000/tonne is in one of these containers?
My opening guess: 75% turnaround efficiency.
Which means that the total energy going into the system and generating capacity would need to increase by up to 25% wherever batteries are involved in delivery. Expensive.
Saltspringson, you are a sod. I watched your link in fascination, He is an ignorant glib conman. Total waste of time.
Awesome article, actually. It is precisely stuff like this that will make solar in particular a viable supply. Right now I could break even on something like 15 year amortization of rooftop covering solar cells. The thing that makes it not really work is the combination of storage and the secondary problem of conversion (and hooking into the power grid to sell surplus back to the power company). The auxiliary hardware is a significant fraction of the cost of solar electrification on a household basis, and the ability to store for nightime use is crucial to people who live or work “off the grid” and want electricity — cabins in the woods, boats, farms, outbuildings. It also lets solar generation interface better with conventional power sources to e.g. pick up the air conditioning overload in summer without needing expensive natural gas generators that can quickly be brought online to buffer clouds and load fluctuations. A big set of batteries can even buffer conventional power generation, and let more power be generated at lower cost during off-peak times and then delivered during the demand peaks.
Hell, I’d invest. I wonder if they will work for laptops, too. I’d LOVE to be able to run a laptop for a day on a charge and not replace the battery for 30 years. Or a cell phone. Or a tablet computer. Or a flashlight. Current rechargable batteries such in so many ways — a whole new technology would be fabulous!
rgb
“Both solar and wind should have been considered for practical application after related technologies such as this have been perfected.”
It won’t make much difference over most of the country anyway. You still don’t get enough power from either to justify the expense and they are very fragile power generators. One good storm takes out your generation infrastructure. Compared to nuclear, it is a waste of money.
It makes sense on a small scale, like a house in the boonies or something but not at an industrial scale.
I’ve always pointed out to people that there are hidden costs of these alternative systems. Everyone touts the front end portion, the wind mill or the solar cell. But the back end of this is the energy storage in times when the energy production exceeds demand, how do you safely and cleanly store the excess energy for use later. No ‘greenie’ wants to think about chemical batteries.
The excess energy from these systems can be stored in other ways, not just chemically.
Per Wikipedia on Flywheel Energy Storage:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel_energy_storage#Physical_characteristics
Flywheel Energy Systems “have long lifetimes (lasting decades with little or no maintenance; full-cycle lifetimes quoted for flywheels range from in excess of 10e5, up to 10e7, cycles of use), high energy densities (100-130 W·h/kg, or 360-500 kJ/kg), and large maximum power outputs. The energy efficiency (ratio of energy out per energy in) of flywheels can be as high as 90%. Typical capacities range from 3 kWh to 133 kWh. Rapid charging of a system occurs in less than 15 minutes.”
But I think one disadvantage is the cost listed in the same article:
Costs of a fully installed flywheel UPS are about $330 per 15 seconds at one kilowatt.
But would that come down with mass production?
So when I pose to ‘greenies’ how much do they want to $pend to save the environment, they always have the suggestions for other people, but never really follow their own advice.
There is something interesting about that batterie in a Technology Review article but only poor details about the electrolyte they use, which is surely the main new component. I hope the patents will not be like the “All Vanadium Redox Batterie”-patent which claims nearly the whole organic and inorganic chemistry to be used in the electrolyte.
“Eos’s key advances involve changes in electrolyte chemistry and cell design. Zinc-air batteries typically use potassium hydroxide, a basic solution that absorbs carbon dioxide from the air. That causes potassium carbonate to build up, slowly clogging the cell’s air pores. Because Eos’s batteries use a novel pH-neutral electrolyte, Oster says, they do not absorb carbon dioxide. The company also uses a unique horizontal cell configuration that relies on gravity rather than a physical membrane to separate the liquid electrolyte from the air. The change, he says, prevents buildups on the zinc electrode from rupturing the membrane and causing cell failure.”
Interesting to see all the comments about how we couldn’t imagine the great advances in tech 100 years ago. What? 100 years ago we were burning stuff for energy. Today we are still burning stuff. 10,000 years ago we were burning stuff. If Tony gets his way we’ll be burning stuff til there’s nothing left to burn— or we are all toast. Jp
saltspringson says:
“The future’s so bright, we’re going to wear shades.”
~~~~~~~~~~~
Here at home we’ll play in the city, powered by the sun
Perfect weather for a streamlined world.
There’ll be spandex jackets one for everyone
…
A just machine to make big decisions,
programmed by fellows with compassion and vision
We’ll be clean when their work is done.
We’ll be eternally free and eternally young
…
What beautiful world this will be, what a glorious time to be free.
…
The future looks bright!
http://www.oldielyrics.com/lyrics/donald_fagen/i_g_y.html
~~~~~~~~~~~~
saltspringson says:
January 16, 2012 at 10:39 pm
“I highly recommend to ayone interested in the future of energy, including energy storage, to take in this lecture:
The future’s so bright, we’re going to wear shades.”
Using fly ash as part of cement is nothing new. Justin Hall seems to be a typical californian evangelist. Maybe his researchers discover something useful here and there, but the way he makes it sound is like they totally revolutionize everything they touch. I call BS.
Moderators, LamontT @9:17 pm
perhaps meant to correct it to “Zonk”?
Cold fusion gets 11,100,000 strikes on google and Andrea Rossi has got N.I. to herd his E-Cats .
He has delivered the first commercial version, with orders for thirteen more. The domestic version is due in the autumn . The Saudis will go from camels to camels in three generations.
Cassandra, agree 100% with your comments.
….that coal, fossil fuels and other polluting methods of harnessing energy does on our environment.
==========================
Intereseting as the post might be.IMO need to be careful doing one column accounting. The column in the ledger regarding the environmental impact of batteries is sorely missing.
Excellent, new patented battery technology. Now an oil company can buy it and sit on it for the next 20 years. By Jake on January 16, 2012 at 9:09 pm
Wow. Conspiracy theory much? I’ve seen ridiculous claims like that for as long as I can remember (and that’s getting to be a pretty long time these days). Like all through the Bush administration (the first one) and the end of the Reagan administration for the matter when we were told that the only reason we didn’t have clean renewables then was because the Reagan had gutted the research money that Carter had put in place to fund the research for our little utopian dream. Well, it’s 35 years since Carter. And back then and stretching into the early 70s and even 60s there were all of these ridiculous “the oil companies” or “the car companies” snatching up technologies and supressing them for profits. Where are these revolutionary technologies? Do you have a single example? All of the patents, if they ever existed and had their patents “snatched up” by Big Oil or the Big 3 (before Big Brother took over two of them – and Jimmy bailed one out in the 70s) those patents have long since expired. Why aren’t we living in the utopian world they promised now?
When I here that line all I can think of is Stephen Hyde sitting in a basement after “self medicating” and raging, “they have a car that runs on water, man!”
Now, if you were being srcastic and I missed, my apoligies.
It so blindingly obvious that it’s astounding no one picks up on this:
The more energy you store in solid state the more dangerous it becomes. No way i am going to live within 10 miles of a 1 terawatt electricity storage facility. A mere car 64 kw battery burns a house down…
The only safe way to store it is in inert fluids such as hydrocarbons that need an external ignition
So the best way to store electricity is to use to turn natural gas into diesel or petrol.
Saves ten problems at once. No need for silly electric cars with batterybombs and zillions of charge systems, but just everything stays the same. No infrastructure changes needed.
but why do it the easy way if you can do it the hard way. Indeed.
You don’t need fancy math to know that storage is not a solution.
If solar and wind were sort of “regularly intermittent”, it could work. If you could always count on wind to blow roughly every other week, or sun to shine roughly every other day, then you could downscale the constant sources and rely on storage for part of your load.
But wind and solar are not even semi-periodic. Nature is whimsical. You can’t count on having enough stored power somewhere in your grid. Even with perfect cheap storage, you still need to build enough constantly running generators to account for your typical full load.
—–Apparently, this company (EOS) has overcome the recharge limitation that exists in conventional zinc-air batteries, and supposedly has several patents on the technology.
—- Anyone have actual patent numbers? I didn’t see any on a casual look at the web site. Do they actually exist?
Thanks
JK
Anthony,
you had asked the key question right in the introduction – “What is the conversion efficiency?” – and strangely only a single person ventured to comment on that topic (Jordan. his guess: 75%).
Unfortunately, the efficiency for Zinc-Air has an upper theoretical limit of 60% determined by physico-chemical properties, but one might be happy to get out 50% in a final system. This is far below the current best standard of pumped storage hydroelectricity of 75-80%. Lead acid batteries are in the same ballpark, Li-Ion may get up into even the 90s%. NiCd and NiMH are in the 70s%.
But for large scale energy storage you also need cycling stability, i.e. how many times can you go through a charge-discharge cycle before the battery is deteriorated, because the cost of an installation is determined by the cost-per-kWh-storage-capcacity divided by the cyles-tolerated. In terms of cycles Lead Acid (LA) performs rather poorly compared to the other battery types, but then LA batteries are cheaper per kWh-storage capacity. Li-Ion are high in cost but promises to be more cycle tolerant, though that remains to be established on a large deployment. Presently Zinc-Air batteries exhibit VERY low cycle stability, well below that of LA, though this may improve in development.
However, you can’t overcome the efficiency limit, which limits the usefulness particularly to industrial storage deployments, since you always need to feed the batteries twice the kWh you want to extract! This immediately doubles the electricity cost and turns it into a big heat generator!
It may still be acceptable when high energy density (per volume and per weight) is required as in an electric car or other mobile operation. But large scale energy storage – I don’t see a chance.
Hey fellow WUWTs, is this thorium reactor for real or a scam? The guy behind it used to work at NASA. Thanks for feedback, just curious.
Kirk Sorensen: Thorium, an alternative nuclear fuel:
http://www.ted.com/talks/kirk_sorensen_thorium_an_alternative_nuclear_fuel.html
Wind turbines do cause pollution many thousands of miles from where you reside.
Toxic lake caused by mining for rare earth elements in China. They are used to make wind turbines.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1350811/In-China-true-cost-Britains-clean-green-wind-power-experiment-Pollution-disastrous-scale.html
John F. Hultquist
Re: “Wikipedia claims: “ At the current rate of consumption, these reserves are estimated to be depleted sometime between 2027 and 2055.””
Please quote reliable resources. See USGS documents on Zinc
USGS Mineral
Mineral Commodity Summaries: Zinc
At the 2010 world production of 12 million metric tons, identified resources would last for 158 years. With an apparent abundant supply, that is just what has been discovered to date.
See also USGS 2009 Mineral Commodity Yearbook: Zinc
Since you brought it up, please take the time to correct Wikipedia citing USGS 2011, 2009.
Just imagine what size battery pack would be needed to back up New York City or Washington for 3-4 days 24 hours a day. After hurricanes there is often a very quiet aftermath of calm, windless, cloudy days. That would be no wind and no solar of any kind. The batteries required would be humungous. Also, such batteries need care and feeding as the work best in a certain temperature range. They are more complicated than first meets the eye.
How many more bandaids are they going to try to put on antiquated wind technology, whose lifetimes are much shorter than advertised, and solar which fails every day and only works well at certain latitudes.