Canada Battery Maker Says Flow Storage Costs to Tumble by Half
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Chances are that Li-Ion prices will be reduced by at least as much, if not much more within 4 years, as the whole carmaking industry starts mass-producing EVs, and other huge Tesla, European, and Asian battery factories go online to serve that market of millions of EVs a year.
I think some Chinese battery maker recently said that they expect Li-Ion battery cell prices to fall to $50/kWh by 2025 (I think they are around $130-$150 now). It may actually happen a year or two earlier, at least for the industry leaders, with everyone else following soon after.
Personally, with the rise of all-electric vehicles and solar roofs/home battery systems (for which Li-Ion is much more convenient), I'm quite skeptical that other technologies will be able to beat Li-Ion in being used by power companies. The ecosystem and economies of scale will greatly favor Li-Ion, for now, and whatever new tech the battery makers decide to adopt later on (like solid state batteries).
Solar + Wind will get us pretty far however. Wind picks up at night, while Solar is best during the day. Natural Gas Peaker Plants seem to be required in any situation I foresee in the next 20 years, but minimizing the use of peaker plants should be the goal.
Alternatively, we build higher base-load plants like nuclear. That would help a lot.
Say we have a 100 MW plant.
Use 50 MW to charge batteries and 50 MW to supply power during the day. Having a battery capacity of 50 MW * 12 h = 600 MWh, will convert this plant to a 50 MW base load plant.
Tesla's recent 25/50 MWh battery cost 25 Million USD, so a 600 one would cost about $300 Million.
If you over-build solar by a factor of 3 (above what you'd expect from an energy-only basis), then you can convert it into a 100% constant output baseload plant using about 50 hours of storage, based on a year of hourly sun data for a single site I found. You don't try to store seasonal energy, you over-size the solar panels so there's significant energy production even on cloudy winter days.
Costs less than you might think, considering the spot price for solar cells is like 10 cents per Watt right now (20 cents for panels).
Works in the continental US. Doesn't work in northern Europe because the winter days are too short (too high latitude).
Flow batteries might work to replace backup generators, but the cost would need to fall much further.
If you look at 20% over capacity as adding 20% to the cost of wind and solar it’s still cheaper than coal. But the minimum is now 20% larger reducing the gap very significantly especially over several days.
Hydro naturally provides long term storage, so you can generally over any remaining gaps before looking to multi day battery storage. Plus your dealing with that 20% over capacity so the next day is very likely to be a net gain.
It also means you can wait to charge at the cheapest possible times, and sell on the absolutely most expensive ones.
And since it's cheaper to add further storage, it means that you can do both the faster cycle with low margins and the slower one with higher margins.
> From a grid storage standpoint longer energy storage just means you have fewer cycles to make up your investment.
Only true if you are selling on the spot market.
You can also get paid for grid security - your ability to potentially deliver power during extreme load or deliver power to constrained nodes.
For example, you may be paid to install and maintain a whole power station that is only expected to be used rarely (or ideally not at all if designed for emergency loads!)
It caused a bit of controversy when they used their authority to shut off people's air conditioner, but allegedly it saved the grid of a potential brownout.
Batteries / Energy Storage is the obvious way to solve the issue. But creative solutions (ie: controlling people's air conditioners) is more feasible in the short run, and probably should be deployed more widely.
When doable I recover working cells from old laptop battery packs, to use them in non critical applications with protected chargers (laptop cells rely on the pack circuitry for protection). Last year I recovered all cells from two new packs that failed to charge because of a failure of the old laptop I bought them for. So I recovered all cells, put them in my charger at a slow 500mA charge (don't use fast charge if not needed, it shortens the cell life) and did a few cycles to test their capacity which was fine. Then I put them in their safety bag and pretty much forgot about them because I was reorganizing my lab. A few weeks back I saw the safety bag and recalled about the cells, so I put them in the charger and tested them: about half of them were dead and all attempts to recover them failed. Of the remaining half some were dangerously close to excessive self discharge but still recoverable and the remaining ones were still fine. In the end all working ones were recovered, but I lost about half of the cells I had; one year of storage albeit in proper environment, no excessive temperature and no load, was enough to kill essentially new cells. Had rechargeable Li-Ion a shelf life comparable to primary Li-Ion cells, it would make them suitable for almost every use, but as of today they sadly aren't even close to that.
You may need to substantiate that claim.
If you mean it's easier to find a vendor for lithium batteries for home use, you're probably correct.
In terms of life span and constraints around usage, discharge, and recharge, I'm not convinced that Li-ion is more convenient.
Utility-scale battery systems is how you democratize the idea for real. Have the entire city own multiple, giant 200 MW-hr Battery that all the citizens can use. Then use net-metering credits to have Solar-homes charge the communal battery.
Not everyone can afford $20,000+ systems to store a few hours of electricity. The people who need reliable home-electricity get $500 generators with some gasoline or propane fuel (which is sufficient for days of electricity during a disaster).
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The city can choose whatever battery best fits its requirements. For the near term, Lithium Ion is available, as well as Pumped Hydro. Flow batteries still seem to be "5 year away" technology, but flow batteries just make a lot of sense at the 200MWhr utility scale.
> Home-scale battery systems is clearly a bad idea IMO.
.. makes me think you're trolling.
There are plenty of places where people need storage on their side of the meter, and the idea that you can better democratise power supply by having it owned by a large multinational or nation state owned entity sounds ludicrous.
The $20k (I'm assuming that's usd?) for 'a couple of hours power' is just plain disingenuous.
For anyone plonking down $800k for a bespoke abode, spending $30k for gen + storage, with or without grid connection, seems a minor addition to the capex.
However thats on a cycle of <24h for multiple week storage, flow batteries have much much lower self discharge.
Either cycle efficiency, or number of cycles before storage drops below 80% of original spec. And storage flow definitely wins on the longevity stakes.
Personally I love the idea of a battery I can scale horizontally with relatively minimal cost / complexity.
Flow batteries would make excellent grid batteries. I was under the assumption that cost and manufacturing were the prime limiters.
A lithium battery has a limited capacity, so you look at the cost per unit energy at a 100% charge. But flow batteries never get ‘full’, they can carry on storing energy until you fill a silo up. I could see a direct comparison on a power basis, or on an levelized cost basis, but those aren’t usually the figures used to index lithium batteries.
Happy to be corrected if I’m wrong. It would be fantastic news if flow batteries became competitive.
It is like a diesel powered generator, where you push diesel and oxygen into it, it creates power while it reacts them both. The difference is that flow batteries also do the reverse reaction, so you can get the original reactants back.
About how long it will stay charged, it does not discharge like a normal battery, but active reactants have a shelf-life.
What we are seeing here is that real vs. possible gap getting smaller.
Flow batteries are more expensive and complex. So they are ideal for utility-scale projects only. When you're powering an entire neighborhood or city with a single battery, you'd probably rather make a Flow battery rather than a million Lithium Ion batteries hooked up together.
It's like saying that the switch where your NAS is connect is full. You can even use that word, but it has a different meaning.
Based on your comment, I guess they mean to say that you get 2x the sustained wattage (not kWh) out of the $150 model.
Is that right?
The scaling of hours is going to be proportional to the tank sizes. The power (KW) rating is going to scale proportional to the electrochemical cell size. The expensive part is going to be the electrochemical cell; tanks are simple and scale well. The "4 hour" and "8 hour" examples would have the same electrochemical cell size since they have the same power (KW) rating but 2x bigger tanks for the "8 hour" version.
A "Flow" Battery's got the advantage of scale. To scale a flow battery, all you gotta do is build a bigger tank. A Lithium Ion battery requires you to build complex circuitry and chemicals throughout the whole battery.
In many ways, Lithium Ion batteries are like Solid State Drives: You got complex circuitry through and through. While Flow batteries are more like a Tape Drive: The drive is way more expensive to make, but "tape" (ie: Tank) is so cheap that the economics of energy storage eventually wins out.