Great if it can continue to be cheaper, of course. Fingers crossed that they can make it work at scale.
That's a significant difference.
Note that we require only a fraction of a year's worth of energy to be stored, I think less than 5% if we accept energy intensive industry in high latitude to take winter breaks, or even more with further tactics like higher overproduction or larger interconnected grid areas.
And that's all without even the sodium batteries that do seem to be viable already.
Another reality is that most of the global grid scale energy usage is not transport via mobile batteries that benefits most from high energy density lithium batteries that pack maximal energy from least weight.
Battery farms don't move, they can use other battery chemistries that are cheaper in resources and weigh a lot more per energy unit than lithium while still powering cities, smelters, processing plants, etc.
As for desalination in general, yes, there will be a lot more of that in coming years, fresh potable water supplies are stretched from a global PoV.
I think there's a good argument for the opposite.
Recycling costs for Li-Ion once we are doing it at scale should be significantly negative. There are valuable materials you get to extract, they aren't in that complex a blend to extract them from, and there's a lot of basically the same blend. The biggest risk in this claim is, I think, the implicit claim that we won't figure out how to extract the same materials from the earth much cheaper in the meantime cratering the end of life value of batteries - but in that event the CO2 battery technology is underwater anyways and the chemical batteries win on not wasting R&D costs.
By contrast while there's some value in the steel that goes into building tanks and pumps and so on, the material cost if a much lower fraction of the cost of the device. Most of the cost went into shaping it into those complex shapes. I don't know for sure what the cost breakdown of the CO2 plant looks like but if a lot of the cost is something else it's probably something like concrete or white paint that actually costs money to dispose of.
And those are very low maintenance over that time.
You're probably mostly going to swap voltage regulators and their fans, perhaps bypass the occasional bad cell by turning the current to zero, unscrewing the links from the adjacent cells to the bad cell, and screwing in a fresh link with the connect length to bridge across.
That's not terrible.
These things would probably pair well with district heating and cooling.
...in 2019, the U.S. utility-scale battery fleet operated with an average monthly round-trip efficiency of 82%, and pumped-storage facilities operated with an average monthly round-trip efficiency of 79%....
This is incorrect for a lot of containerized lithium systems. They have a lot of moving parts in their AC systems - the compressors, the fans, the cooling water pumps.
Lithium cells really don't like to be hot. If you put them next to solar farms in the sun belt or if you discharge them moderately quickly, you'll have to cool them. This cooling system also eats into the overall efficiency, but what's even worse is that its the majority of the maintenance budget.
A few percent here of there is not that important if the input energy is cheap enough.
"We’re matching the performance of [lithium iron phosphate batteries] at roughly 30% lower total cost of ownership for the system." Mukesh Chatter, cofounder and CEO, Alsym Energy
All of that vs lithium/sodium where you can incrementally install batteries and let it operate without much concern. Maybe some heaters if they are installed in especially cold climates.
Sodium batteries can operate down to -40C. There are very few places on Earth where they would need a heater.
Who in their right mind would pay 40% more to pick a dangerous and fussy product just because it's a bit smaller and lighter for their home?
But initial claim was “fraction of the cost, tomorrow” which is super incorrect.
What I'm opposing is flippantly relegating a new technology with real benfits, that the largest manufacturer of lithium batteries is significantly betting on, to the 0.01% of the market.
You say 0.01%, largest manufacturer of lithium batteries says 50%. If you meet half way it's still about 25% which is significant.
https://undecidedmf.com/why-the-biggest-battery-company-is-b...
Yes, eventually it might be 50%, but right now you can't even get _specs_ from CATL while LFPs are traded like commodity.
https://www.catl.com/en/news/6401.html
Are you sure you aren't the one blinded by hype?
And if you want an alternative, sodium batteries are already coming online.
Sodium iron phosphate batteries, if Li prices don't continue to fall, will be some of the cheapest batteries out there. If they can be made solid state then you are looking at batteries that will dominate things like grid and home power storage.
AFAIR Cobalt is also kinda toxic which is a concern.
But as far as that and
> In fact, the limiting element for Li chemistries is generally the Nickel
Isn't that part of why LiFePO was supposed to take off tho? Sure the energy density is a bit lower but theoretically they are cheaper to produce per kWh and don't have any of the toxicity/rarity issues of other lithium designs...
It's the exact reason LFPs are taking off, especially in grid storage scenarios.
The high cycle life combined with the fact that all the materials are easy to acquire and dirt cheap.
LFP cells have long since taken off. Tesla has been making vehicles with LFP battery packs for half a decade now.
There are plenty more, but they're explored only when there's a price hike.
What I'm somewhat surprised about is that we've not seen synergies with desalination and ocean mineral extraction. IDK why the brine from a desalination plant isn't seen as a prime first step in extraction lithium, magnesium, and other precious minerals from ocean water.
I think these guys are basically using desalination tech to make lithium extraction cheaper: https://energyx.com/lithium/#direct-lithium-extraction
As I understand it (which is far from perfectly) it's still not using ocean water, because you can get so much higher lithium concentration in water from other sources. But it's a more environmentally friendly, and they argue cheaper, way to extract the lithium from water than just using the traditional giant evaporation pools.
But once summer electricity becomes cheap enough due to solar production increasing to handle winter heating loads with the (worse) winter sun, we can afford a lot of electrowinning of "ore" which can be pretty much sea salt or generic rock at that point.
Form Energy is working on grid scale iron air batteries which use the same chemistry as would be used for (excess/spare) solar powered iron ore to iron metal refining.
AFAIK the coal powered traditional iron refining ovens are the largest individual machines humanity operates. (Because if you try to compare to large (ore/oil) ships, it's not very fair to count their passive cargo volume; and if comparing to offshore oil rigs, and including their ancillary appliances and crew berthing, you'd have to include a lot of surrounding infrastructure to the blast furnace itself.)
It will take coal becoming expensive for it's CO2 before we really stop coal fired iron blast furnaces. And before then it's hard to compete even at zero cost electricity when accounting for the duty cycle limitations of only taking curtailed summer peaks.
Billions of dollars in cost, run 24/7 with virtually no downtime during regular operations, in underground tunnels with circumferences in the tens of miles, and all throughout is actively-coordinated super conductors and beam collimation in a high-vacuum tube attached to absurdly complex, ultra-sensitive, massively-scaled instrumentation (not to mention the whole on-site data processing and storage facilities). Certainly open to bring convinced otherwise, but aside from ISS in pure cost, so far it's my understanding that those are the pinnacle of large-scale machines.
It's good for engineers and planners to have multiple solutions available that provide better fit to their prerogatives and needs.
We don't need one solution to do it all. We need plural ones.
And foreseeable future they provide such huge value for grid stability that it wouldn’t make sense economically either.
Battery recycling still hasn't really left the "we can do it in a lab" stage.