According to their website[1], this is the extent of what they have to say about their technology:
The Technology
Form Energy has identified and is developing a novel approach that is low-cost, safe, and scalable. This battery would allow for a 100% renewable, carbon free grid.
I have followed this strain of industry for many years and have been actively looking for something to invest in.
Storage is not even close to being at a useful stage for anything other than pilot projects which is why that is what we have and not any really large scale storage facilities and won't have it anytime soon. It's not a matter of economics but physics and we just don't have any fundamental scientific discoveries that warrant the hype we see.
It's more a matter of chemical engineering. The dollars-per-ionization maths can be made to work. The problems are more in bulk chemical handling and manufacturing processes and the materials science of electrodes.
(Oddly this is the same state as the thorium reactors, which make sense on paper but are annoyingly hard to build)
The physics is there. As for economics - there's a lot of low-hanging fruit to be picked in the peak-shaving market, where prices are very different from baseload, as Musk's famous 100-day from commissioning to completion battery showed.
What physics principle can you cite here? There are no physical limits that have stoped the current grid scale deployments.
It's all economics: how cheaply can you get materials to your factory and how cheaply can you roll your batteries.
(And just a warning, this sort of invocation if physics when it doesn't apply is a way to scare off technical people from wanting to let you invest in them.)
There are real, grid scale installations in California, Australia, and other places in very recent years. Another GWh will be deployed to Moss Landing, CA soon.
The real problem is convincing utility execs to try something new. Based on how they are regulated, saving money doesn't necessarily mean that they can increase their profits. And in fact rate-basing means that they often want to spend a ton of money on unnecessary projects.
You can get it cheaper because we have better technologies that make it possible and we have better technologies available because we can make it cheaper.
There are real attempts at all sorts of things. That doesn't mean they are feasible at- scale.
And we are talking energy here not just electricity.
Thanks for the warning but you couldn't be further from the reality with regards to that part.
However I think we often underestimate what can be done simply by scaling up an economy. Nobody (as in no published estimates) anticipated the precipitous drop in battery costs, or solar PV costs. And even more people were skeptical of the dramatic costs on wind turbines.
Many (most?) utility executives and planners aren't aware of these cost drops, based on their planned deployments and their IRP processes. They often use old cost estimates rather than projections of costs into the future, even!
I wish you tons of luck on your ventures, we really need more people like you out there!
Solar and wind are less than 1% of world energy consumption and not expected to grow substantially.
It's nothing what so ever and there is a reason why a lot of funding for renewables died out in the beginning of this century and only countries with a political agenda is left.
China reduced their investments into alternatives last year too.
With regards to storage until we have proper fuel-cells that are mobile and easy to fill up we aren't closer to anything useful than we are to fusion or Thorium, in fact Thorium and fusion might be more likely to happen.
With regards to Thorium and Fusion. Again i don't think anyone here really appreciates how hard a problem energy storage is. Fuel Cells that can actually be used like oil or gas or coal is sci-fi and the some still to be seen magic grid won't change that.
A good tell is that I have gotten 20 downvotes from this discussion but not a single piece of evidence that what I am saying is wrong. Not a single technology or system in use at scale. Only wishful thinking.
You have been very wrong, and refused to acknowledge the rebuttals to your false points.
For example, you point to IEA'a current solar usage stats, so you are presumably using them for your far more controversial statement "not expected to grow substantially," which is a somewhat comical thing to say. The people who have been making that prediction of "not expected to grow substantially" have been ludicrously wrong, for a looooong time. This is from way back in 2017, and the IEA has not improved their projections since then:
The IEA stats are probably correct for current usage. It's a lot harder to put your thumb on the scale when it comes to grid measurements. But when it comes to renewable tech, the IEA has been hilariously wrong because they are backward looking and refuse to acknowledge the reality of what's going on right now.
Accusing others of "wishful thinking" when you can't back up your own claims, is not a very civil thing to do. To ignore the cited examples of where storage has worked is also not a very civil thing to do. To make such broad proclamations about the feasibility of a technology without even being aware of the current deployments is not a very wise position to take.
Talking about shipping technologies low adoption rates as proof that they cannot grow is a logically incorrect statement. But to then propose technologies that are not shipping and are no where close to shipping (thorium, fusion), as more realistic, well, let's bring up again who is doing the wishful thinking and wearing rose colored glasses.
Your own source indicates that solar + wind have been growing at a rate of 10%+ for over a decade now. Not sure I understand what were you trying to say by this.
Essentially all existing gridscale battery deployments are for voltage or frequency support, not for meaningful energy storage. That is, they do not discharge to provide scheduled generation but instead to alleviate very short term flow problems or transmission congestion.
That's all good stuff and I've been involved in planning out several such installations with utility executives, but the basic question of energy density is always going to dictate whether or not a battery installation can be be scaled up to offset a generator by timeshifting surplus generation to when the load exists for it.
A moderate size city can easily pull GWh. The sum total of all current grid scale installations in California would cover the Western Interconnect for something like .0002 seconds if you handwave transmission.
You're mostly incorrect here, most grid scale installations are for DCM and local capacity in areas where the grid is oversubscribed. You're correct that current storage capacity is small but there are a lot of companies installing storage so that'll change quickly. The software works fine for this stuff, too, I wrote some of it at one company, it's not a hard software problem at all.
When it comes to batteries, energy density is not a concern, it's only cost.
Cost has been high enough that frequency regulation has been the biggest use.
Cost is still high enough that uses from multiple revenue streams will be necessary to fully recoup costs, except in fantastically fucked up markets like where the Tesla battery went in Australia.
But the writing is on the wall. Looking at current usages, and current market penetration, and thinking its reflective of the future is exactly what Palm did when the iPhone came out. Costs are falling exponentially, but the switchover will be happen much faster than the price change once storage is cheaper than its alternatives, it's a non-linearity.
We are already seeing a lot of bids for future solar and wind installs including storage, and then bidding on capacity payments, which is a sea change from even two years ago.
Utilities, if they were more forward looking, could be using this technology switch as an opportunity to massively increase their profits. Unfortunately, nearly all I've heard of are instead living in the past and don't want to accept a world where they have to anticipate advancing and improving technology, and are scared of losing the lobbying power that comes from a tight alliance with fossil fuels. It's perhaps good to have stolid and conservative leadership in something as essential as utilities, but at some point ignoring new tech becomes more dangerous and radical than trying to embrace it.
Density is a problem and that doesn't go away by saying it's just an economic problem. Heat is just one example of a problem with density.
Again there is a lot of wishful thinking out there but the second you dig into it you realize there is nothing substantial, unfortunately.
You are more than welcome to send me any link to something that is even close to be ready for production and scale. You won't find it.
What you will find is that places like Denmark and Germany cost go up because you need backup in the forms of oil, coal, gas, or nuclear which needs to be factored in.
This is the third time in a few days that I've heard the completely fabricated concern of "energy density" being a problem for grid storage. It's ridiculous, where is this false talking point coming from? Repeating it merely shows that you are willing to propagate politics without checking facts.
The old AES deployment in Escondido, CA fits 5MWh in a shipping container. Let's say 250MWh per acre, with a single layer of containers.
Or just look at a typical Tesla, which can power the owner's house for several days, using a tiny fraction of their garage. Battery storage can be deployed at substations, at decommissioned thermal-based generators, etc.
I really wonder what sort of political industry rag has been spreading this "energy density" nonsense. If the people saying this were accountable enough for their words to be held to them in five years, they would look rather silly.
I'll gladly own my words for 5 years. Lets meet in 5 and see.
I have been accountable for my words for a long time now, more than 5 years. And I have still to see any of your claims come to fruition. Go back 5 years and you will see people claiming what you are claiming now.
It's just not that simple.
We are talking at scale here not just some Tesla projects for the 1st world or a few pilot projects paid for by governments.
Density is a serious issue for any serious storage of energy on top of that getting the energy from the renewables into the storage.
If it wasn't we would be living in a very different world. Economics isn't the problem here, feasibility is and the fact that we don't have any serious examples of what you claim is no problem kind of illustrates the point more than claiming it's a quesiton of conservative utillity execs.
Ok, please explain what limitations there are from "physics," or what limitations the current energy density of batteries places on them for deployment.
Also, what about the AES battery in Escondido, or the Tesla battery in Australia make them not count? What part of "at scale" are you talking about here? An installation of one project that contributes to the grid?
The people that said that batteries were coming five years ago were correct. Deployments are going faster than anticipated, and costs are stopping faster than anticipated.
If these deployments are shy of hitting some barrier that would prevent larger scale deployment, what is that barrier? I contend that the barrier is cost, which is changing all the time. Can you explain to me what barrier you think there is in addition (or in place of) cost? Is it just the politics of decision makers?
You are the one claiming so you need to show how you are going to store enough energy around ex. the US to be able to reliably provide energy from renewable energy sources to everyone that needs it or let's just say 50% of the energy needs (not just electricity).
Electricity is around 20% of the total energy consumption.
The limitation is storing enough energy at a small enough area with enough distribution.
So no, they weren't right at all. We aren't seeing any mass adoption of them only a lot of claims about potential and that is why very few people are investing. Not because they are scared but because there aren't any solutions to some of the foundational problems. That would require new discoveries.
> You are the one claiming so you need to show how you are going to store enough energy around ex. the US to be able to reliably provide energy from renewable energy sources to everyone that needs it or let's just say 50% of the energy needs (not just electricity).
No, I do not believe I claimed that here. This started with me asking for what physical limit existed for energy storage, a question that you still have not answered. That said, I do believe that a 100% renewable grid AND 100% renewable energy usage is possible, based on the modeling scenarios that have been provided to match renewable production, battery storage, thermal storage, to the seasons and years of recorded weather patterns. So when you say "physics" is the problem but seemingly are unaware of a vast body of academic work that goes counter to your claim, I'm a bit skeptical that you've investigated much here.
>Electricity is around 20% of the total energy consumption.
Not sure what your point is here, but I will take it as an opportunity to point out that electrification of non-electrified energy uses typically requires several factors less energy. The majority of energy "use" is actually energy waste:
Nonetheless, electrification of other sectors presents a huge opportunity for expansion of utilities, and their leadership has been foolish not to pursue this. I see them spouting many of the same falsehoods that you do, so perhaps they have just buried their head in the sand. Since utilities are not a free market, they can get away with doing whatever the hell they want, unfortunately.
> The limitation is storing enough energy at a small enough area with enough distribution.
Thank you for finally at least describing things in physical terms, but this does not imply that current energy densities are an issue with storage, unless you put some rough bounds on "enough energy." Even then, I suspect cost will be an issue FAR before any sort of physical limitation.
>We aren't seeing any mass adoption
Because of costs. And because of regulatory issues. And because of inertia. But for somebody to be "wrong" on this they'd have to claim mass adoption. I don't know of anybody who claimed mass adoption, just drastically falling prices, which has occurred.
New discoveries are not required, just falling costs. As the rather silly article that you link first states:
> But, besides being extremely costly in their current form, the required number of batteries needed to back up intermittent renewables would be astronomical as the above citation for New York City attests
>> “A new battery for a full-size car stores 1 kWh. Running New York City for two cloudy, windless days would require about 530 million such batteries, about 62 per person…”
They are talking about lead acid car batteries here! Not even a Leaf battery! This is, well, to put it kindly, a strawman. This sort of low-quality thought is endemic to the criticism of renewables, because to get a really solid-sounding criticism you have to make up odd scenarios like that.
So lets look at your second article, a much discussed opinion piece, that kind of rests on this part here:
>At current prices, a battery storage system of that size would cost more than $2.5 trillion.
Using "current costs," something that nobody is proposing to do. Also, no comparison for what the cost of the alternative would be, so it's just a big scary number floated as if it were an impossibility just because it's big. If we were to rebuild our current energy infrastructure from scratch, how much would it cost? Certainly far far more than $2.5T. And how much would it cost to build 12 hours worth of energy storage? Certainly far far less than $2.5T. So it's a long opinion piece built just to rile up emotions, with a veneer of quantitative thinking to let peop...
So in other words. You can't back up your claim about the future.
No one claimed that there won't be battery storage or grids in the future. But the claim that it can somehow be done with renewables is simply flat out factually wrong.
I have already answered with regard to density. Heat is one of them. This is why you don't see any large scale investments ex. from the Chinese either.
It's as simple as that.
The future will still need plenty of gas, oil, nuclear and coal for a long time to go. Renewables will never be able to fill that gab, they are inferior and unreliable.
Pumped hydrostorage is the obvious exception: it's cheap and widely deployed, and has been around forever. It's major problem is that the cheap price depends on favorable geography.
Yes, the biggest impediments to a complete renewable vein are sociological, not technology or economic.
Entrenched interests who are resistant to change are passing laws to prevent deployment of cheaper tech for our electrical grid. They have discovered that it only takes a couple hundred thousand dollars to fund state-level elections to capture the politician the control state level policy. And since most utilities operate in at most a handful of states, it's super easy for them to but regulatory capture.
It doesn't hurt that an entire political machine has also been fired up to inspire hatred for renewable tech, without any basis in the reality of how it is currently (and mostly quietly) changing our electrical grid for the better, and massively improving air quality.
Usually a website and PR that is this weak on details would raise lots of red flags for me, but Mateo Jaramillo is one of the cofounders and I was really curious what he was up to since left Tesla, turns out its this. He was on a podcast a while back talking about seasonal storage. While this battery doesn't appear to be that, maybe it will form the basis for seasonal storage.
Looks to be a flow battery, so the power to energy ratio is tunable by changing the ratio of membrane surface area to storage tank volume. The chemistry is likely either sodium sulfur or lithium sulfur.
If the anolyte/catholyte can be made cheaply enough, it may actually be able to do seasonal storage economically. However as wind and solar get cheaper, I'm not sure we will need it. The cost of curtailment during peak season is going to fall just as quickly as the cost of panels falls, and that cost is ultimately what seasonal storage has to compete against.
This is a press release. There are a lot of battery announcements, and we should basically ignore the ones that don't have a constructed installation in operation.
The reasoning is sound; for every element on the periodic table, you can assign a dollar cost, and an ionization energy. From the ionization energy you can work out the electrode voltage of a particular chemistry, and therefore the terminal voltage of the battery, and therefore how much energy is liberated from each electron exchange. Divide "watts per atom" by "dollars per atom" and you have your bulk storage cost. Throw out all the substances that are annoying to store (sorry, hydrogen), or don't behave nicely in an ionic liquid at room temperature.
That gives you the smattering of elements that have been tried for batteries. Lithium wins on weight because it's at the top left (sorry again, hydrogen), and the collection of "post-transition metals". Zinc, Cadmium, Mercury, Lead: all popular. Aluminium-air batteries exist but are expensive.
Sulphur seems all on its on in the "reactive nonmetals" bucket. I'm guessing it's being considered due to availability especially in sulphuric acid form.
The paper you link to is about a battery that reacts oxygen with a metal-sulfur radical.
It does not convert metals between metallic and ionized forms, and does not take sulfur into or out of the complex, so your can't just traverse the periodic table and get there. On practice battery research is about ballacing a much larger set of features, like cycle efficiency and durability, so the obvious metal+halogen solution almost always loses.
Yes. So many that a site of 1, 2, and 5 years ago in battery announcements would be useful. They don't have a battery installation. They have a press release that they signed a contract to do a battery installation. There's a difference.
The tech is still secret, other than being "aqueous air."
Did anybody ever get the "flow battery" thing to work well enough to be useful? That at least solves the capacity problem; you're limited only by tank capacity.
(Edit: After rewatching, a little short on the actual tech, but tons of info on the chemistry, materials science, markets, and economics of battery storage in all of its forms. Here is the original paper https://www.cell.com/joule/pdf/S2542-4351(17)30032-6.pdf)
MIT Professor Donald Sadoway also invented a liquid metal battery and founded a company called Ambri. Talks by him are easier to find.
Both have interesting tech, flexible chemistry, and good price models that beat wildly optimistic lithium ion battery price forecasts.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 156 ms ] threadIn a potential big win for renewable energy, Form Energy gets its first grid-scale battery installation
MIT professor founder, backed by Bill Gates amongst others.
According to MIT tech review [0] , their main line of research is an "air-breathing aqueous sulfur flow battery".
The Technology
Form Energy has identified and is developing a novel approach that is low-cost, safe, and scalable. This battery would allow for a 100% renewable, carbon free grid.
Super useful
[1]" https://formenergy.com/about/
The complete absence of any critical journalism is just astounding.
So many "in the future" "potential" "could" "might" "eventually" in these kind of articles.
It's a pilot project, they don't know if it will work but they might have some software that can help it and a breakthrough method that might work.
Amazing if they manage to do it, I wouldn't count on it personally.
You just don't see them because they get quietly merged in the process.
Storage is currently twice as cheap as it was just two years ago and doesn't appear to be slowing down. Hell, it's growning at an exponential rate.
Storage is not even close to being at a useful stage for anything other than pilot projects which is why that is what we have and not any really large scale storage facilities and won't have it anytime soon. It's not a matter of economics but physics and we just don't have any fundamental scientific discoveries that warrant the hype we see.
(Oddly this is the same state as the thorium reactors, which make sense on paper but are annoyingly hard to build)
https://holtecinternational.com/company/divisions/hi-power/
The physics is there. As for economics - there's a lot of low-hanging fruit to be picked in the peak-shaving market, where prices are very different from baseload, as Musk's famous 100-day from commissioning to completion battery showed.
What physics principle can you cite here? There are no physical limits that have stoped the current grid scale deployments.
It's all economics: how cheaply can you get materials to your factory and how cheaply can you roll your batteries.
(And just a warning, this sort of invocation if physics when it doesn't apply is a way to scare off technical people from wanting to let you invest in them.)
There are real, grid scale installations in California, Australia, and other places in very recent years. Another GWh will be deployed to Moss Landing, CA soon.
The real problem is convincing utility execs to try something new. Based on how they are regulated, saving money doesn't necessarily mean that they can increase their profits. And in fact rate-basing means that they often want to spend a ton of money on unnecessary projects.
You can get it cheaper because we have better technologies that make it possible and we have better technologies available because we can make it cheaper.
There are real attempts at all sorts of things. That doesn't mean they are feasible at- scale.
And we are talking energy here not just electricity.
Thanks for the warning but you couldn't be further from the reality with regards to that part.
However I think we often underestimate what can be done simply by scaling up an economy. Nobody (as in no published estimates) anticipated the precipitous drop in battery costs, or solar PV costs. And even more people were skeptical of the dramatic costs on wind turbines.
Many (most?) utility executives and planners aren't aware of these cost drops, based on their planned deployments and their IRP processes. They often use old cost estimates rather than projections of costs into the future, even!
I wish you tons of luck on your ventures, we really need more people like you out there!
Solar and wind are less than 1% of world energy consumption and not expected to grow substantially.
It's nothing what so ever and there is a reason why a lot of funding for renewables died out in the beginning of this century and only countries with a political agenda is left.
China reduced their investments into alternatives last year too.
With regards to storage until we have proper fuel-cells that are mobile and easy to fill up we aren't closer to anything useful than we are to fusion or Thorium, in fact Thorium and fusion might be more likely to happen.
Citation needed, as I was unable to find a source that backed up any of these claims.
in fact Thorium and fusion might be more likely to happen.
What signs point to that?
With regards to Thorium and Fusion. Again i don't think anyone here really appreciates how hard a problem energy storage is. Fuel Cells that can actually be used like oil or gas or coal is sci-fi and the some still to be seen magic grid won't change that.
A good tell is that I have gotten 20 downvotes from this discussion but not a single piece of evidence that what I am saying is wrong. Not a single technology or system in use at scale. Only wishful thinking.
For example, you point to IEA'a current solar usage stats, so you are presumably using them for your far more controversial statement "not expected to grow substantially," which is a somewhat comical thing to say. The people who have been making that prediction of "not expected to grow substantially" have been ludicrously wrong, for a looooong time. This is from way back in 2017, and the IEA has not improved their projections since then:
https://steinbuch.wordpress.com/2017/06/12/photovoltaic-grow...
The IEA stats are probably correct for current usage. It's a lot harder to put your thumb on the scale when it comes to grid measurements. But when it comes to renewable tech, the IEA has been hilariously wrong because they are backward looking and refuse to acknowledge the reality of what's going on right now.
Accusing others of "wishful thinking" when you can't back up your own claims, is not a very civil thing to do. To ignore the cited examples of where storage has worked is also not a very civil thing to do. To make such broad proclamations about the feasibility of a technology without even being aware of the current deployments is not a very wise position to take.
Talking about shipping technologies low adoption rates as proof that they cannot grow is a logically incorrect statement. But to then propose technologies that are not shipping and are no where close to shipping (thorium, fusion), as more realistic, well, let's bring up again who is doing the wishful thinking and wearing rose colored glasses.
I have pointed to a source you haven't pointed to anything.
I will leave it to others to judge who have facts to back up their claims.
That's all good stuff and I've been involved in planning out several such installations with utility executives, but the basic question of energy density is always going to dictate whether or not a battery installation can be be scaled up to offset a generator by timeshifting surplus generation to when the load exists for it.
A moderate size city can easily pull GWh. The sum total of all current grid scale installations in California would cover the Western Interconnect for something like .0002 seconds if you handwave transmission.
It's wishful thinking.
Cost has been high enough that frequency regulation has been the biggest use.
Cost is still high enough that uses from multiple revenue streams will be necessary to fully recoup costs, except in fantastically fucked up markets like where the Tesla battery went in Australia.
But the writing is on the wall. Looking at current usages, and current market penetration, and thinking its reflective of the future is exactly what Palm did when the iPhone came out. Costs are falling exponentially, but the switchover will be happen much faster than the price change once storage is cheaper than its alternatives, it's a non-linearity.
We are already seeing a lot of bids for future solar and wind installs including storage, and then bidding on capacity payments, which is a sea change from even two years ago.
Utilities, if they were more forward looking, could be using this technology switch as an opportunity to massively increase their profits. Unfortunately, nearly all I've heard of are instead living in the past and don't want to accept a world where they have to anticipate advancing and improving technology, and are scared of losing the lobbying power that comes from a tight alliance with fossil fuels. It's perhaps good to have stolid and conservative leadership in something as essential as utilities, but at some point ignoring new tech becomes more dangerous and radical than trying to embrace it.
Again there is a lot of wishful thinking out there but the second you dig into it you realize there is nothing substantial, unfortunately.
You are more than welcome to send me any link to something that is even close to be ready for production and scale. You won't find it.
What you will find is that places like Denmark and Germany cost go up because you need backup in the forms of oil, coal, gas, or nuclear which needs to be factored in.
There is no way around that.
The old AES deployment in Escondido, CA fits 5MWh in a shipping container. Let's say 250MWh per acre, with a single layer of containers.
Or just look at a typical Tesla, which can power the owner's house for several days, using a tiny fraction of their garage. Battery storage can be deployed at substations, at decommissioned thermal-based generators, etc.
I really wonder what sort of political industry rag has been spreading this "energy density" nonsense. If the people saying this were accountable enough for their words to be held to them in five years, they would look rather silly.
I have been accountable for my words for a long time now, more than 5 years. And I have still to see any of your claims come to fruition. Go back 5 years and you will see people claiming what you are claiming now.
It's just not that simple.
We are talking at scale here not just some Tesla projects for the 1st world or a few pilot projects paid for by governments.
Density is a serious issue for any serious storage of energy on top of that getting the energy from the renewables into the storage.
If it wasn't we would be living in a very different world. Economics isn't the problem here, feasibility is and the fact that we don't have any serious examples of what you claim is no problem kind of illustrates the point more than claiming it's a quesiton of conservative utillity execs.
You have zero base for those claims.
Also, what about the AES battery in Escondido, or the Tesla battery in Australia make them not count? What part of "at scale" are you talking about here? An installation of one project that contributes to the grid?
The people that said that batteries were coming five years ago were correct. Deployments are going faster than anticipated, and costs are stopping faster than anticipated.
If these deployments are shy of hitting some barrier that would prevent larger scale deployment, what is that barrier? I contend that the barrier is cost, which is changing all the time. Can you explain to me what barrier you think there is in addition (or in place of) cost? Is it just the politics of decision makers?
You are the one claiming so you need to show how you are going to store enough energy around ex. the US to be able to reliably provide energy from renewable energy sources to everyone that needs it or let's just say 50% of the energy needs (not just electricity).
Electricity is around 20% of the total energy consumption.
The limitation is storing enough energy at a small enough area with enough distribution.
So no, they weren't right at all. We aren't seeing any mass adoption of them only a lot of claims about potential and that is why very few people are investing. Not because they are scared but because there aren't any solutions to some of the foundational problems. That would require new discoveries.
https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/renewable/battery...
https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/07/27/141282/the-25-tr...
No, I do not believe I claimed that here. This started with me asking for what physical limit existed for energy storage, a question that you still have not answered. That said, I do believe that a 100% renewable grid AND 100% renewable energy usage is possible, based on the modeling scenarios that have been provided to match renewable production, battery storage, thermal storage, to the seasons and years of recorded weather patterns. So when you say "physics" is the problem but seemingly are unaware of a vast body of academic work that goes counter to your claim, I'm a bit skeptical that you've investigated much here.
>Electricity is around 20% of the total energy consumption.
Not sure what your point is here, but I will take it as an opportunity to point out that electrification of non-electrified energy uses typically requires several factors less energy. The majority of energy "use" is actually energy waste:
https://flowcharts.llnl.gov
Nonetheless, electrification of other sectors presents a huge opportunity for expansion of utilities, and their leadership has been foolish not to pursue this. I see them spouting many of the same falsehoods that you do, so perhaps they have just buried their head in the sand. Since utilities are not a free market, they can get away with doing whatever the hell they want, unfortunately.
> The limitation is storing enough energy at a small enough area with enough distribution.
Thank you for finally at least describing things in physical terms, but this does not imply that current energy densities are an issue with storage, unless you put some rough bounds on "enough energy." Even then, I suspect cost will be an issue FAR before any sort of physical limitation.
>We aren't seeing any mass adoption
Because of costs. And because of regulatory issues. And because of inertia. But for somebody to be "wrong" on this they'd have to claim mass adoption. I don't know of anybody who claimed mass adoption, just drastically falling prices, which has occurred.
New discoveries are not required, just falling costs. As the rather silly article that you link first states:
> But, besides being extremely costly in their current form, the required number of batteries needed to back up intermittent renewables would be astronomical as the above citation for New York City attests
>> “A new battery for a full-size car stores 1 kWh. Running New York City for two cloudy, windless days would require about 530 million such batteries, about 62 per person…”
They are talking about lead acid car batteries here! Not even a Leaf battery! This is, well, to put it kindly, a strawman. This sort of low-quality thought is endemic to the criticism of renewables, because to get a really solid-sounding criticism you have to make up odd scenarios like that.
So lets look at your second article, a much discussed opinion piece, that kind of rests on this part here:
>At current prices, a battery storage system of that size would cost more than $2.5 trillion.
Using "current costs," something that nobody is proposing to do. Also, no comparison for what the cost of the alternative would be, so it's just a big scary number floated as if it were an impossibility just because it's big. If we were to rebuild our current energy infrastructure from scratch, how much would it cost? Certainly far far more than $2.5T. And how much would it cost to build 12 hours worth of energy storage? Certainly far far less than $2.5T. So it's a long opinion piece built just to rile up emotions, with a veneer of quantitative thinking to let peop...
No one claimed that there won't be battery storage or grids in the future. But the claim that it can somehow be done with renewables is simply flat out factually wrong.
I have already answered with regard to density. Heat is one of them. This is why you don't see any large scale investments ex. from the Chinese either.
It's as simple as that.
The future will still need plenty of gas, oil, nuclear and coal for a long time to go. Renewables will never be able to fill that gab, they are inferior and unreliable.
Entrenched interests who are resistant to change are passing laws to prevent deployment of cheaper tech for our electrical grid. They have discovered that it only takes a couple hundred thousand dollars to fund state-level elections to capture the politician the control state level policy. And since most utilities operate in at most a handful of states, it's super easy for them to but regulatory capture.
It doesn't hurt that an entire political machine has also been fired up to inspire hatred for renewable tech, without any basis in the reality of how it is currently (and mostly quietly) changing our electrical grid for the better, and massively improving air quality.
https://twitter.com/jburwen/status/1258483960964939776?s=21
Usually a website and PR that is this weak on details would raise lots of red flags for me, but Mateo Jaramillo is one of the cofounders and I was really curious what he was up to since left Tesla, turns out its this. He was on a podcast a while back talking about seasonal storage. While this battery doesn't appear to be that, maybe it will form the basis for seasonal storage.
Still, the ratio of megawatts to megawatthours is quite interesting if it represents their chemistry.
If the anolyte/catholyte can be made cheaply enough, it may actually be able to do seasonal storage economically. However as wind and solar get cheaper, I'm not sure we will need it. The cost of curtailment during peak season is going to fall just as quickly as the cost of panels falls, and that cost is ultimately what seasonal storage has to compete against.
There are a few flow batteries about using the vanadium-redox chemistry: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/vanadium-re... - and that web page lists operating installations.
From the other comments it appears this might be sulfur: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511...
The reasoning is sound; for every element on the periodic table, you can assign a dollar cost, and an ionization energy. From the ionization energy you can work out the electrode voltage of a particular chemistry, and therefore the terminal voltage of the battery, and therefore how much energy is liberated from each electron exchange. Divide "watts per atom" by "dollars per atom" and you have your bulk storage cost. Throw out all the substances that are annoying to store (sorry, hydrogen), or don't behave nicely in an ionic liquid at room temperature.
That gives you the smattering of elements that have been tried for batteries. Lithium wins on weight because it's at the top left (sorry again, hydrogen), and the collection of "post-transition metals". Zinc, Cadmium, Mercury, Lead: all popular. Aluminium-air batteries exist but are expensive.
Sulphur seems all on its on in the "reactive nonmetals" bucket. I'm guessing it's being considered due to availability especially in sulphuric acid form.
It does not convert metals between metallic and ionized forms, and does not take sulfur into or out of the complex, so your can't just traverse the periodic table and get there. On practice battery research is about ballacing a much larger set of features, like cycle efficiency and durability, so the obvious metal+halogen solution almost always loses.
Yes. So many that a site of 1, 2, and 5 years ago in battery announcements would be useful. They don't have a battery installation. They have a press release that they signed a contract to do a battery installation. There's a difference.
The tech is still secret, other than being "aqueous air."
Right.
There's a web site: https://formenergy.com/ Stock photos and an onboarding funnel.
Did anybody ever get the "flow battery" thing to work well enough to be useful? That at least solves the capacity problem; you're limited only by tank capacity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E76q-9q7ZDg
(Edit: After rewatching, a little short on the actual tech, but tons of info on the chemistry, materials science, markets, and economics of battery storage in all of its forms. Here is the original paper https://www.cell.com/joule/pdf/S2542-4351(17)30032-6.pdf)
MIT Professor Donald Sadoway also invented a liquid metal battery and founded a company called Ambri. Talks by him are easier to find.
Both have interesting tech, flexible chemistry, and good price models that beat wildly optimistic lithium ion battery price forecasts.