Massive Lithium Ion Battery Fire/Explosion Shows Challenges of Renewable Energy Storage (apnews.com) 211
Pursuing a renewable energy strategy, Arizona's largest electric company "installed massive batteries near neighborhoods with a large number of solar panels, hoping to capture some of the energy from the afternoon sun to use after dark," reports the Associated Press.
Slashdot reader pgmrdlm shares their report on what happened next: But an April fire and explosion at a massive battery west of Phoenix that sent eight firefighters and a police officer to the hospital highlighted the challenges and risks that can arise as utilities prepare for the exponential growth of the technology. With an investigation ongoing and no public word on the fire's cause, the incident is being closely watched by energy storage researchers and advocates... "Absent battery storage, the whole value proposition of intermittent renewable energy makes no sense at all," said Donald Sadoway, a battery researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-founder of battery storage company Ambri...
Nearly all of the utility-scale batteries now on the grid or in development are massive versions of the same lithium ion technology that powers cellphones and laptops... Arizona Public Service (APS) has assembled a team of engineers, safety experts and first responders to work with the utility, battery-maker Fluence and others to carefully remove and inspect the 378 modules that comprise the McMicken battery system and figure out what happened....
The APS fire was the third involving a utility-scale battery. One was at an APS-owned battery in Flagstaff in 2012, and the other was in Hawaii. APS has shut down its two similar batteries while awaiting the investigation's results, but the utility is not slowing down its plans to deploy new massive batteries, said Alan Bunnell, a company spokesman. "We believe energy storage is vital to a clean energy future here in Arizona," Bunnell said.
Slashdot reader pgmrdlm shares their report on what happened next: But an April fire and explosion at a massive battery west of Phoenix that sent eight firefighters and a police officer to the hospital highlighted the challenges and risks that can arise as utilities prepare for the exponential growth of the technology. With an investigation ongoing and no public word on the fire's cause, the incident is being closely watched by energy storage researchers and advocates... "Absent battery storage, the whole value proposition of intermittent renewable energy makes no sense at all," said Donald Sadoway, a battery researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-founder of battery storage company Ambri...
Nearly all of the utility-scale batteries now on the grid or in development are massive versions of the same lithium ion technology that powers cellphones and laptops... Arizona Public Service (APS) has assembled a team of engineers, safety experts and first responders to work with the utility, battery-maker Fluence and others to carefully remove and inspect the 378 modules that comprise the McMicken battery system and figure out what happened....
The APS fire was the third involving a utility-scale battery. One was at an APS-owned battery in Flagstaff in 2012, and the other was in Hawaii. APS has shut down its two similar batteries while awaiting the investigation's results, but the utility is not slowing down its plans to deploy new massive batteries, said Alan Bunnell, a company spokesman. "We believe energy storage is vital to a clean energy future here in Arizona," Bunnell said.
Environmental impact of Lithium Ion (Score:5, Interesting)
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Buddy, If you're calling out by username and you're an AC, then you're a supreme coward.
I'm pretty sure you know that, and you're just trolling. The fact that you're scared enough to be afraid of the average slashdot commenter to post AC means you must be pretty damn weak-a veritable throwback to the Atlas comic book sand kicked in the face advertisements your grandfather invariably sent away for. PS: he's not really your grandfather, your grandmother cheated on him with the gardener.
All energy-dense storage mechanisms are bombs. (Score:5, Insightful)
If something is energy-dense enough to work as a compact large-scale battery, it's energy-dense enough to serve as a big boom when broken in just the wrong way.
That's how all our fuels work.
Fuels/batteries are how we store energy so that it doesn't have to be used exactly as it is generated. Using all that power at once by accident in an uncontrolled way means a boom, thank to thermodynamics.
Same thing if you compressed air tightly enough to serve as energy storage, or filled a large enough flywheel with enough energy, and then released it all at once.
None of this is an argument against electric storage mechanisms, or even just this type. There's no foolproof way to densely store energy - just ways we're used to, and ways we're still learning about. Each form has advantages and consequences.
Batteries just avoid most of the conversion cost of other methods with some of our newer, more maintainable energy generation systems. That never meant that they're better at everything.
Ryan Fenton
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LiFePO4 batteries don't suffer from thermal runaway like other lithium-ion chemistries. What chemistry was in those battery cells in Arizona?
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Yep.
Energy density on LiON batts is at least 0.875 MJ/kg on the top end (i would imagine better than that now).
Other energy densities:
gunpowder: 3 MJ/kg
dynamite: 7.5 MJ/kg
gasoline: 10.4 MJ/kg
So batteries are approaching a third of the energy density of gunpowder, always gonna be dangerous to some extent storing that much boom.
Whats wrong with water towers + turbines? (Score:2)
Use the excess electricity to raise a large amount of water up to some appropriate height then use it to drive a turbine on the way down. This is already done with some mountain reservoirs so why not try it on a small local scale? Its not as if water towers don't already exist. Perhaps its not as efficient as batteries, I don't know, but it certainly has zero chance of blowing up!
Re:Whats wrong with water towers + turbines? (Score:4, Informative)
Tower storage of water has been used in the past when nothing else was available. It's very limited in capacity compared to the costs of building and maintaining the tower structure. Modern pumped storage systems use reservoirs and convenient geography (a steep slope with a short distance between top and bottom reservoirs) and lots of water, millions of tonnes of it to store useful amounts of energy for grids. 1000MWh in will return about 750MWh back after losses for pumped storage, typically.
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Whats wrong with water towers + turbines?
They need to be too big.
Imagine something massive, a 100m radius tower, 100m tall tank, with the base of the tank 50 meters off the ground. Vast. Truly vast, 500 times larger than the largest water tower I could find. That would store about 856 MWh, about the same size as the largest currently installed battery.
Perhaps its not as efficient as batteries, I don't know, but it certainly has zero chance of blowing up!
It has a non zero chnace of collapse. Any time you st
Efficiency and cost (Score:2)
Use the excess electricity to raise a large amount of water up to some appropriate height then use it to drive a turbine on the way down. This is already done with some mountain reservoirs so why not try it on a small local scale?
Because it is economical not viable unless you happen to live near a large mountain reservoir. his isn't to say pumped hydro is a bad idea where available, just that it's geographically restricted and has limited potential capacity compared with known demand for energy storage. We've already used a lot of the available capacity and there is no way to make new capacity unlike with batteries.
Batteries also have the advantage that they can adjust to fluctuating capacity demands nearly instantaneously. Hydro
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yeah, in this case it'd blow down.
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Lithium battery fires are kind of nasty though. A safer but a little less efficient option is low temperature sodium sulphur. But lithium is cheap due to being mass produced.
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Lithium battery fires are kind of nasty though. A safer but a little less efficient option is low temperature sodium sulphur. But lithium is cheap due to being mass produced.
Sodium is cheaper than lithium. No one's particularly been trying to scale up sodium production, but it's easy to produce (just add electricity) and sodium ore is so cheap and plentiful that it's not even called ore. Sulphur is a byroduct of the oil industry and very cheap.
I doubt sodium fires are any nicer than lithium ones.
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Sodium fires are probably less toxic than lithium fires. That would be less nasty. Don't want to huff either one, though.
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"do not explode when they fail"
Then why do they put such heavy armor around those turbochargers, turbopumps, ultracentrifuges, jet engines etc, etc. if that's the case?
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https://www.timesunion.com/loc... [timesunion.com]
Flywheels big enough to serve as industrial batteries would indeed explode in catastrophic failure. Dense potential energy is dense potential energy.
Ryan Fenton
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That article says water sprayed to cool down the wheels turned into steam and caused the explosion.
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Indeed - and why would that have caused an explosion?
Because the heat buildup was already at the point where it turned the carbon in the flywheel into a cotton-candy like mix
What happens in that kept building without the emergency cooling? Structural failure.
What would you call a mass of molten metal radially expelling at a very high rpm? I'm count it as a pretty big boom.
To be fair - this is a very rare result, even in test - but failures happen. High enough energy densities are always going to present
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Flywheels big enough to serve as industrial batteries would indeed explode in catastrophic failure. Dense potential energy is dense potential energy.
I'm not going to say that this is a non-issue, but it is a well-solved problem [beaconpower.com]. (TL;DR: Carbon fiber flywheels which self-shred into essentially cotton candy are floated on maglev bearings in a vacuum chamber.) These are obviously expensive to produce (carbon fiber having a high energy cost in production) but there are no doubt other potential solutions to the problem of unplanned self-disassembly during high-RPM operation. I suspect the easiest one is still going to just be to bury them. You could do layer
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Compressed gasses are terrible because it takes loads of energy to compress it and decompressing a gas comes with its own thermal and input/output management issues. There's also the geological and environmental impact of having large tunnels bored and stressing out rocks with continuous pressure fluctuations so you're still creating a massive bomb in the end.
Pumping water and flywheels are probably the safest form to store excess energy, at worst you get a few flooded basements or a loud bang as the thing
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Yes - LFTRs won't fail in the exact same way that other fission based systems will fail, in terms of core meltdowns - but there's still the same failure types I mentioned:
https://liquidfluoridethoriumr... [glerner.com]
It's still dense potential energy, set up to have high output. Trigger enough at once, and you still get a boom.
Again - that doesn't make it bad - it's inherent to its usefulness!
Ryan Fenton
Put the batteries deep underground (Score:2)
Then let them burn
I have an idea (Score:2, Insightful)
Unicorn farts are safer. (Score:2, Insightful)
We just use those for power generation. Done.
Tritium is highly dangerous to us water based organisms. And being chemically hydrogen they not only get taken up by humans but cannot be held in any pressure container: it will migrate through anything.
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Even the most optimistic projections of the cost of fusion energy puts it at ten times current grid electricity costs - all that high tech gear costs money. It will never be a cost effective way to produce electricity.
Simply building a high excess capacity of solar and wind will provide sufficient power cheaper even under the worst possible conditions.
Tesla in South Australia (Score:3)
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Plenty of Tesla cars have had their batteries caught on fire and they require lots of attention through software and hardware. If you're putting it in a residential area, you have to assume someone eventually is going to drive a car into it and you also have to assume that nobody from the electrical company will take another look at it for 25+ years.
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What's your sample size? One? Tesla certainly has plenty of experience with batteries catching fire and exploding.
Anyway it's all pointless. Lithium used for grid storage is a temporal quirk. It won't win the market. I will wager vanadium redox flow batteries with their easy repair at end of life, and trivial capacity expansion will win.
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Extremely different technologies (that are potentially complimentary).
Lithium Ion is like an SSD. Very high bandwidth, expensive, and small. vs Flow batteries are like a spinning HDD. Very high capacity, cheap but large.
E.g. flow battery in Japan has a 60MWh capacity but only 15MW of power. Compare that to Tesla's 'big battery' 129MWh capacity and 100MW power.
Like SSDs vs platter drives at some point in order to get the 'speed' you need you have way more capacity than you want. It doesn't make sense for
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You're all wrong, and I can refute you with two words: Crocodile Dundee.
"That's not a battery....THAT'S a battery!"
Use the right tool for the job (Score:2)
Lithium-Ion is optimized for portability. Manufacturing scale off the shelf is the only real advantage it brings. And familiarity for all the non-engineers, plus I guess Elon Musk ramming it down our throats.
Whoever figures out flow batteries or whatever is the right tool for the job and gets it to market is going to win in the long run, but nobody wants to give those folk the time of the day lately.
Vanadium flow batteries, anyone? (Score:3)
Whatever happened to those utility-scale vanadium redox batteries that we used to keep hearing about? These are not as compact as Li-ion, but in a stationary application that doesn't matter.
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Land costs up-front money. If privately owned, then annual taxes as well. It would also be no shock to anyone that bigger installations require more maintenance, and dare I say it, more security.
Still further, then there is the zoning and NIMBY issues, which only increase with footprint.
The Federal government needs to start a big project, much like the Hoover Dam, except its pumped water s
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-
We will probably never have another project like the Hoover Dam. It would never pass modern OSHA standards. 112 people died during it's construction (and maybe another 42 died of related complications). Tod
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Not Covered under the OSH Act:
o) The self-employed;
o) Immediate family members of farm employers; and
o) Workplace hazards regulated by another federal agency (for example, the Mine Safety and Health Administration, the Department of Energy, or the Coast Guard).
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Land costs up-front money.
Land costs almost nothing in places where these batteries are being deployed.
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In fact one could imagine such a system being built right next to the Hoover Dam, increasing its overall energy production capacity.
Pumped storage is a way of making fluctuating energy sources more usable, so there would be totally no point in 'building one next to Hoover Dam'.
In fact, we could use Hoover Dam itself as a pumped storage facility. Below the dam, there is a series of low dams on the same river. You could have wind and solar farms in the vicinity of Davis Dam, 70 miles downstream, pump water from Davis' lake up into Lake Mead, which has a lot of unused capacity right now. This stored energy would then subsequently be used a
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Their problem comes with lack of investment. Right now there are only a few small companies supplying them and they are flat out completing demonstration projects and scaling them up. The technical demo in China (Hubei Zaoyang Storage Integration Demonstration) was completed and commissioned at 3MW at the start of the year and is currently being scaled up.
Currently there are smaller installations providing a buffer for solar PV and wind all over the place. But the development of grid scale VRBs is still in
Energy density? (Score:3)
Why would you use something as flaky as a LI-Ion battery in this application? It makes sense in cars, but you have more-or-less unlimited space to put a stationary battery, so I am not sure why energy density is an issue. Some gigantic lead-acid cells or something even more rudimentary - but safe - technology would seem to make more sense.
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Why would you use something as flaky as a LI-Ion battery in this application?
Cost benefit at the current state of technology. I don't think Li-Ion will win ultimately in grid scale applications. I suspect VRFBs will end up the leading technology. However right now, in 2019, your choice is Li-Ion, and that's pretty much it. Lead-acid is a horrible relic which would consume an incredible amount of land all for a pitiful life expectancy. It doesn't make much sense to use lead-acid for anything that you don't want to replace within 5-10 years. i.e. put it in your home, in your UPS, but
Re:Energy density? (Score:5, Informative)
Lead acid batteries, AGM deep cycle on a UPS, boat etc can easily survive 10+ years with minor management. Even in cars (perhaps the worst situation for a battery regards temperature swings, mechanical forces, current draw and the most simple charging mechanism) they typically do well over 5 years and even old car batteries will still be at 70-80% capacity except what they're needed for (the cold crank current draw) isn't there anymore. It also doesn't help that car manufacturers spec out batteries 'just large' enough to last them for 3 years, once you put a quality battery 20% larger than what the manufacturer tells you, you can expect 7-10 years from them.
Lithium batteries don't behave well once they're outside of spec, you overcharge, undercharge, deep cycle, draw too much and they're pretty much toast. I haven't had a lithium battery in a laptop last more than 5 years without some major issues or even outright swelling/overheating. You don't see lithium batteries as cold crank current supplies in cars.
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You don't discharge and then recharge batteries in a UPS every day. You keep them topped off 24/7. That's why lead acid batteries are appropriate for that particular use. Even in a car they only get discharged a very small amount when you turn the key.
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Low temperature sodium sulphur solves all these issues. They can be deep discharged without damage, they are fairly resilient to abuse and fairly safe. Not as efficient as lithium (some energy is needed to heat them up to around 95C) but very environmentally clean.
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You never seen a datacenter where they do get tested and partially discharged relatively often (anytime there's a blip or maintenance on the net). Large scale lead acid battery banks have been a thing for at least 20y, most data centers have a separate building or room for them. You can discharge lead acids fully as long as you slow-charge them and maintain them once in a while unlike lithium.
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Lead acids don't work when you need them. Painful experience both with colocated servers and local UPS's says that there's at least a 10% failure that they fail when actually required, despite regular testing.
Hopefully lithium will turn out better.
Flow batteries for infrastructure (Score:2)
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Are you high?
Lead acid chemistry has a cycle life optimistically around 200-300. The best case scenario is the cylinder shaped flooded cells with horizontal plates (“ATT Battery”), running about 5x your typical quality flooded cell, or about $2,300/kWh. Those will last about 40-50 years and maybe closer to 500 cycles.
Lithium is chosen because it can handle the cycles and is cheap. Flow batteries are better, but the costs have not come down as much. I think the SoNick batteries are still around
Why lithium ion? (Score:4, Informative)
The primary advantage of Li-ion over other battery technologies [batteryuniversity.com] is energy density. They store the most energy for a given volume and a given weight. In nearly all other aspects, Li-ion are poor batteries. They're expensive. They don't last very many cycles. They're very sensitive to temperature. They're extremely temperamental - they can catch fire or explode [youtube.com] if you overcharge them or over-discharge them or puncture them. That's why they're now banned in the cargo holds of airliners. (Other batteries just turn into a powdered mush [youtube.com] if you destroy them.)
For phones, laptops, and cars, the high energy density is of paramount importance. But for utility-scale power storage, energy density does not matter. Who cares if the batteries take up 4x as much space as Li-ion? The utility can just build a bigger building to house the batteries. Who cares if the batteries weigh 10x as much as Li-ion? You're not going to be moving them around; they're just going to sit in one place their entire life. So why are you using Li-ion for an application where they're ill-suited?
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Li-ion wins for the same reason Silicon rules practically everywhere it can possibly be made to work: It has economies of scale. Right now grid-tied battery storage is a tiny portion of battery sales, and that does not justify investing the effort into dedicated battery chemistries. The large batteries will just have to cope with what is available.
Perhaps if grid batteries become a huge success this will change, but it seems likely that for the next 10 years most batteries will be made for the transport sec
Excited for Supercapacitor storage!!! (Score:3)
When town's Supercapacitor goes wrong, town vanishes!!!
What are the chances someone shot at it? (Score:3)
In 2013 someone shot up an electrical substation with a high powered rifle. I bet a well placed shot or two could make a most satisfying boom. At least they would be able to figure that out pretty quickly.
An alternative? (Score:2)
The reality of the scale of the issue... (Score:2)
NiMH or Super Capacitors? (Score:2)
So don't use Li/ion (Score:2)
Instead use zinc bromide flow batteries.
Ambri, Sadoway, and Liquid Metal Batteries (Score:2)
The summary neglects to include why any quote from Dr. Donald Sadoway is interesting. He's worked for many years on Liquid Metal batteries. His graduate students spun out Ambri to commercialize the technology and have several nice demonstration projects. I'm unaware of any commercial installations, but their technology looks more promising than most new battery technologies.
* Low cost materials
* Several viable chemistries to tailor to specific applications and battery designs
* Virtually unlimited number of
Re: Let's bury that story (Score:1)
Hahaha that's priceless!
Re:Let's bury that story (Score:4, Interesting)
Don't want to derail the libtard agenda with facts and science!
You lost the moral high ground with "libtard" ...
But, more to the point, there are fires / explosions at places like oil refineries [cnn.com] (literally, last week in Philly) and liquified natural gas plants [scientificamerican.com] and oil/gas power plants [wikipedia.org] etc ... which can be just as, if not more, dangerous.
Re: Let's bury that story (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: Let's bury that story (Score:2)
Re: Let's bury that story (Score:2)
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Li-ion is not the only grid-scale battery tech that's had problems. NGK in Japan has been working on sodium-sulphur batteries for static use for several decades now and they've had a couple of fires in their batteries too (but no explosions).
Their S-Na battery tech is used in what is probably the largest battery power storage array in the world attached to a small wind farm in Rokkasho in Japan. It can store 245MWh and deliver 34MW. The design of the battery array keeps each individual battery unit separate
Re: Let's bury that story (Score:4, Informative)
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Signed actual fusion physicist.
Not buying it. You seem to know some physics and yet are completely ignorant.
Superconducting magnets exist to produce intense magnetic fields, which store energy. The next scale up of magnetic fusion, ITER, will have magnets that store 51 gigajoules of energy [iter.org] which is the equivalent of 12 tons of high explosive. If the magnets quench all that energy is going to turn to heat in the coils at once.
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Logging is, indeed, one of the most dangerous professions (it seems to compete with commercial fishing).
However, I doubt many of those deaths are from "chopping wood" - more likely they are from being hit by timber being pulled to the tower yarder, or a widow maker while felling a tree, or as a result of chainsaw accidents, or from vehicle accidents on sketchy roads/logging trails.
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Well, with stationary applications, density shouldn't be an issue. You can put some space between the cells for cooling, and you don't have to charge them so high and fast. Or you can play it real safe and use nickel-iron batteries. They can last a century or more. And they produce lots of hydrogen to collect for your flying cars
Re: Let's bury that story (Score:2)
Re: Let's bury that story (Score:2)
Re: Let's bury that story (Score:5, Insightful)
And a "tactical nuke"? That's a LOT of gasoline.
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And a "tactical nuke"? That's a LOT of gasoline
There are tactical nukes with yields as low as 20 tons (not kilotons) of TNT. That's about 4 tons of gasoline.
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You must practice at being wrong. I don't have time to deal with most of your FUD so I'll just address your last point:
And no, there's no way to make batteries that store a lot of energy out of benign chemicals.
You can buy these [wikipedia.org]. Nickel, iron, and potassium hydroxide in a plastic case. Two base metals and the primary precursor to most soft and liquid soaps, in aqueous solution. It's not the highest energy density, and its charge and discharge rate per cell is relatively low, but it's dense enough to have been the primary motive power battery in forklifts around the world for decades. Its char
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We need an energy storage medium that can be punctured, shredded, crushed, shocked, soaked, frozen, burned ...
You might want to check out the PBS series Nova, Season 44 Episode 3, Search for the Super Battery [pbs.org] (Aired: 02/01/17) and discussed in this Forbes article, A Battery That Could Change The World [forbes.com] (May 20, 2018):
The NOVA documentary profiled the work of Professor Mike Zimmerman of Tufts University. Professor Zimmerman has developed a battery that replaces the liquid electrolyte in the battery with a flame-retardant plastic. This battery won't catch on fire if it is cut, punctured or crushed. In fact, it can continue to produce power despite significant damage.
Lithium ions produced at the lithium electrode travel through the plastic as quickly as they do a liquid electrolyte. The plastic also physically prevents the electrodes from forming the dendrites that can short out the battery. Lithium metal can be used for the negative electrode, which could potentially double the battery's energy density.
Prof. Zimmerman has apparently formed a company to pursue this, Ionic Materials [ionicmaterials.com] and Bill Joy (yes, that Bill Joy) is on the Board of Directors...
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As in all announcements of "revolutionary" battery technology of the last 50 years, it's best to wait for a proof of production batteries utilizing the technology before getting one's hopes up. That approach saves a lot of disappointment.
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You are describing C4. The 'event' that would happen is still well under tactical nuclear levels, so no worries. It also has great energy density compared to Lithium Ion.
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You're missing the point: while the destructive power of gasoline hasn't changed too terribly much over the decades,
Yes that's because it's already one of the most energy dense storage mechanisms we have. For example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
battery energy density is only going to increase.
It's much lower than hydrocarbon fuels and it's unlikely to ever match them in density.
We need an energy storage medium that can be punctured, shredded, crushed, shocked, soaked, frozen, burned and possibly shat
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We need an energy storage medium that can be punctured, shredded, crushed, shocked, soaked, frozen, burned and possibly shat-upon or eventually, regardless of how unlikely an "event" is to happen, when it does happen, it'll be akin to a tactical nuclear attack.
You mean like every battery on the market other than the Lithium ones being used here? What is being done at the moment is a victim of a cost benefit technological gap. Lithium won't make it big in grid storage going forward, it's use right now is temporary as companies are gearing up for vanadium redox batteries which currently are struggling to be supplied as fast as they are being ordered.
China already has VRBs with twice the power and 8 times the capacity of the battery Tesla deployed in Australia.
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You're missing the point: while the destructive power of gasoline hasn't changed too terribly much over the decades, battery energy density is only going to increase. We need an energy storage medium that can be punctured, shredded, crushed, shocked, soaked, frozen, burned and possibly shat-upon or eventually, regardless of how unlikely an "event" is to happen, when it does happen, it'll be akin to a tactical nuclear attack.
Actually no to all of the above, with regard to grid scale storage. We do not need higher battery energy density for that above what we now have (about 1000 J/g). The only important metric for grid storage is cost per kilowatt hour, amortized over time. That's it. Energy density is unimportant (the batteries don't go anywhere and are put where land is cheap), also they are not in any danger of being punctured, shredded, crushed or frozen at least, and if you require appropriate siting soaking can also be e
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Batteries are limited because they have to bring both sides of the reaction. That means they will never be as dense as proper fuels like gasoline or coal.
We have no particular problems handling gasoline or coal, despite the occasional mishap. We will be fine with batteries too, despite the occasional mishap.
Re:Let's bury that story (Score:5, Interesting)
Lithium batteries are getting safer as technology improves.
Cellphone/tablet fires were more common in the early years, even though way more are used today. Grid storage with lithium batteries is having growing pains, but will be stable as the tech matures.
But lithium still doesn't make much sense for grid storage. Lithium is used in cellphones and electric cars mainly because it is light and energy dense. These don't matter near as much for grid storage, so we should use something more cost effective. Like sodium.
Sodium-ion batteries [wikipedia.org]
Sodium is cheap, plentiful, and unlike lithium, sodium-ion batteries can be drained to zero-charge, so the grid can use all the stored energy every daily-cycle.
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Unfounded speculation.
Batteries will not improve much more than the current state. Look at it this way. When you limit yourself to energy storage which does not require any mass flow (e.g. you do not need an external source of oxidant) then TNT is one of the best. Its energy density is 7 MJ/l. The best lithium ion batteries have energy density of 2.5 MJ/l. You can expect batter improvement at most by 3 times. More likely less than 2 times (since you need to keep some material intact to structurally hold anode, cathode and the membrane/electrolyte.
In other words, do not expect any significant changes to battery energy density.
Because the only relevant metric for battery improvement is volumetric energy density? Nonsense. And why the arbitrarily imposed "no mass flow"? Flow batteries are a thing, as are batteries that use oxygen from air (look up aluminum-air battery).
Even with your silly and arbitrary "no mass flow" restriction you are wrong. TNT is not one of the best, it is much inferior to any combination of a metal and solid oxidizer. Dead-pressed thermite has a density of 16 MJ/l, and even better compositions exist.
We don't
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I don't think Sodium-ion will win. More likely vanadium redox is likely to secure the grid market. It has all the benefits listed, is non toxic, non hazardous, and capacity can be improved by building a storage tank for more liquid. When the battery is end of life all you need to do is replace the contact membrane.
The downside is it has moving parts and thus requires maintenance, but then current grid batteries attract maintenance as well so I'm not sure that's much of a problem.
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There can be more than one winner, since it is not even a single contest, but a range of similar applications.
The cost and availability of vanadium itself is an issue. With very large wind and solar utilization energy storage on the scale of a few days of grid consumption becomes highly desirable.
Currently 40% of the cost of a V-redox facility is just for the vanadium. This ratio will likely climb as the plants themselves become cheaper due to scale and experience, and more demand for vanadium will create u
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I don't agree on multiple fronts:
Winner:
In a stable defined application there is rarely more than one "winner" in a technology choice. Only when the application varies is there typically multiple winners and for grid storage applications they requirements are typically incredibly similar with similar constraints.
Vanadium supply:
Vanadium's abundance on the planet is measured in % of the earth's crust. The USGS estimate covers only the reserves in actual vanadium mines. Vanadium is a waste product of most min
Re: Let's bury that story (Score:2)
In almost all cases, including the HP recall, it was because these guys were pushing the tolerance levels of the batteries. How much/fast they charged, how little they had to expand, and how thin the plate separators were.
Samsung's was a glorious Fup. Like a 6 year old, they put a different sized battery in because it fit. They didn't test nor QA the decision and just released it.
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The difference being, those are in industrial areas, these batteries are scattered everywhere. Going forward they will have to generally give up on spreading out these systems and just having isolated mega batteries I'd imagine.
Re:Let's bury that story (Score:5, Interesting)
It was caused because people need electricity, so the utility ran electrical infrastructure though a pile of kindle, probably did the best it could to insure that the infrastructure would not set the kindle on fire, and gave the people what they wanted.
In the end, despite the best engineering effort, the completely preventable occurred and the forest caught on fire.
Amazing enough the customers who demanded the very dangerous set because they wanted to live in the middle of nowhere but they also wanted the full luxury of modern life, sued the very company that provided the necessity of modern life.
Here is the thing. Life is dangerous. If someone makes a product that is not engineered for safety and they reasonable know it is dangerous, and do not provide adequate warnings, then they should be sued. But everything is dangerous, and the question is if the new solution is more dangerous than the old solution.
In fact, with the Campfire thing, and many other situations, local battery storage is going to be safer. In that case if batteries could have put in an area not surrounded by fuel, fewer lives might have been lost if the battery failed.
In other cases, transformers fail all the time, and some of the catch fire. Even if they do not catch fire, all transformers contain toxic materials. Batteries do also.
So any discussion has to be if something new is worse. For example, wind turbines kill some birds, but probably so do the toxic emissions of power plants. Cars are the #1 killer of teens, but what is the consequence of not having teen drivers? It is a balance.
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Seems like a lot of hired hands on this thread.
Fire was caused by a 70-year old transmission tower that had been considered structurally deficient for two decades.
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It was called the camp fire, not the campfire fire. It was a shit name, like most of Cal fire's names, but get it right.
Pge willfully neglected their duty to trim trees threatening transmission lines, and nobody whatsoever prevented them from doing the work they agreed to do. There have been some places where battles have been fought to keep pge from cutting some trees, but that didn't happen in this case.
The fire happened because pge didn't do their jobs, and paid out hundreds of millions in executive comp
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Except almost every substance on earth used for power is purposefully explosive, flammable, and/or destructive in some way: coal, gasoline, natural gas, nuclear, lithium ion batteries, etc.
The only thing that is remotely safe to build and use is wind power (they can still fail and break apart and hurt something/someone however) or solar panels, but storing power generated has to be stored using a battery, and the battery that is the biggest and can store the most power is lithium batteries.
Unless we discove
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Hydroelectric is historically by far the most dangerous form of energy production.
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Except when a dam breaks. Then it's really really bad.
Re:This is why electric vehicles are a fad (Score:4, Insightful)
We have safer batteries. They are physically larger, but who cares in a stationary application? They should save the Li-Ions for EVs.
Economies of scale (Score:2)
We have safer batteries. They are physically larger, but who cares in a stationary application? They should save the Li-Ions for EVs.
That doesn't mean they are cheaper [wikipedia.org]. They use Li-Ion because those are the ones we are manufacturing at scale (primarily for transport use as you rightly point out) and thus the economies of scale do their thing and they are available in the quantities needed. You are correct that they arguably are not the optimal technical choice for many static grid scale applications where space and/or weight are not primary considerations. But what matter most is the economics of the project and for better or worse, L
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That doesn't mean they are cheaper.
Holy jebus that's a tortured table. And oh look, I just found a bug in Excel 97 where it visits hovered links I didn't even click. I use it to format tables copied from webpages because it's a lot better at it than OO.o is (fucking horrible about pasted HTML tables.) Guess i'll just stare at the HTML intently. Wikipedia is sitting on millions of dollars and spends big bucks developing multimedia presentations nobody looks at, but can't make tables sortable on click? WTF.
With that rant out of the way, that i
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Li-ion was way too expensive when they came out, so the answer to this problem is obviously to buy the vanadium batteries and in doing so, will see them come down in price.
If that's too much of a problem, then rent them or buy them over 20 years.
BTW the vanadium flow batteries aren't that more expensive once you consider the cost over their lifetime compared to li-ion.
Re:This is why electric vehicles are a fad (Score:5, Informative)
but storing power generated has to be stored using a battery
That's certainly not true. Batteries may be the most practical way to store power in some cases, but they are only one of many ways to store power. Other approaches include flywheels [wikipedia.org], pumped water storage [wikipedia.org], compressed air storage [wikipedia.org], thermal energy storage [wikipedia.org], storage via refrigeration [greentechmedia.com] or even simply moving heavy weights uphill [aresnorthamerica.com].
All of those do invoke some level of risk, as one would expect when storing large amounts of power. It seems like an obvious way to mitigate risk in all cases is to keep the energy-storage site away from people.
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We have to replace [utility scale LiON batteries] with something else.
Utility scale vanadium redox seems like a winner - unless there's something still better ready or in the works.