An interesting and well balanced article, but for this (emphasis added):
> Anyone who imagines a future of electric passenger planes, long-duration grid storage and air taxis is conjuring a dream founded on lithium.
Grid storage doesn’t rely so much on density. Sodium-ion batteries would do (as well as the other numerous storage technologies that don’t rely on lithium)
CATL is starting to scale up production, but they haven't been explored much until now. The thought is that they might be similar enough to lithium batteries that they could benefit from much of the same industrial learning. But only time will tell.
If lithium prices spike again, it will provide an opening for replacements. Until then, there's little pressure to move off the main path for batteries that can be used in a wider range of applications.
Lithium ion's density might not be needed for grid storage, but it also doesn't pose any problems, as you point out.
The first 'large scale' sodium ion grid storage went online in May, so it might take some time for it to trickle down. But I think the economics of it already work today.
What about second-life use though for lithium batteries in grid storage?
We're building a lot of EVs right now. Pretty much any battery has hard to process material in it. Packs for vehicles last between 5-15 years, but there's still a lot of energy storage capacity left.
You reduce the amount of processing & mining needed AND make EVs more affordable if you can extend the life of the battery pack beyond just it's automotive application by giving it another life in grid storage.
> What about second-life use though for lithium batteries in grid storage?
Scale and immediacy. We already have some places in the world that have an overcapacity of renewables, but still suffer from outages due to the energy market. And if the current exponential trend continues, we will reach renewables overcapacity world wide by the mid 2030s. We essentially needed wide deployment of grid-scale batteries yesterday to offset decommissioned baseload and curtail the use of peakers that can charge through the nose when power drops. There's a strong market for a dirt cheap, dispatchable, deep cycling, and scalable battery chemistry, esp. without the resource bottleneck of lithium supply. Sodium ion wins on all those counts even though it's still, relatively speaking, a nascent technology.
I can't see how this works at scale personally. You'd at minimum need standards in cell construction so that you can plug them into some kind of rack. Battery packs as standard come in too many different formats, voltages and cell chemistries etc.
Standardize different pack coms for HV solar inverters.
The big hurdle here is insurance. It’s a regulatory nightmare, nobody wants to spend the money to provide the data that these packs are safe for grid tie. Even though they have the data for vehicle safety…
Taking the Hyundai Ionic 5 as an example you have 3 capacities 58.2kwh, 72.6kwh and 77.4kwh with 114s2p, 180s2p, 192s2p. These have nominal voltages of 523v, 653v and 697v respectively.
Even for the same car it's not trivial to use these all in the same system. It might even make most sense to couple them on the AC side but that would mean a lot of small expensive inverters.
I'd assume the plan is not "use pack as is" but to split it into constituent 18650 cells and build a mega-pack. I'm not sure how reliable that would be..
Yeah, even that is tricky. Every different manufacturer has different packaging for the cells. The Nissan Leaf for example uses a pouch style cell rather than 18650 cells. Even if you stick to say Tesla batteries you have to undo the wire bonding and probably spot weld each battery back together, then balance and charge the pack ensuring you don't have any duff cells. It's a lot of work for reclaiming batteries on an industrial scale.
There just aren't many car batteries that are at the end of their life in a vehicle. Their lifetime seems to be a lot longer than many thought early on. Other than the Leaf batteries, most EV batteries from 10 years ago are still going. Even with those the volume was low. Now that volume is increasing, it will still take 10-15 years before you start to see the current batteries available for reuse. The average age of a car on the road is around 12 years so you will start to see vehicles decommissioned and many of those will still have useful batteries but we need much larger numbers of batteries and sooner for grid-scale usage.
There's growing commercial use of EVs. These will be driven harder and longer. They will not last 10+ years.
The point that you're missing is that you can extend a packs life with a secondary application. That secondary application can make the cost of its first use lower making EVs more easier to adopt.
This requires more and more material. However we can recycle this material back through tearing it apart, which is a costly process.
It would be better to recycle a pack to its base material later than sooner. So the second life use allows for delaying the teardown & reclaiming process.
Grid storage needn’t rely on batteries at all. We could store energy as hydrogen for example. AFAIK that’s the most proven way for storing months worth of energy.
Hydrogen is the least proven one. It looks good on paper but there's remarkably little green electrolysis being done and most of it is going to industrial use to replace "brown" H2. Storing H2 at the same scale as existing natural gas storage is tricky because it diffuses much more.
Why would you expect a lot of electrolysis right now? There is basically no market since electricity oversupply is still a relatively rare event and natgas is cheap. That doesn’t mean that the technology is immature.
I haven't familiarised myself with the latest in hydrogen development, but isn't the round trip efficiency absolutely horrible? Not to mention boil off and leakage (afaik no material exists that can store hydrogen without leaking).
Hydrogen as energy storage would be amazing, but as far as I am aware it is still far from practical at this point.
Efficiency only matters in so far as it affects cost per MWh. It is plausible (from what I heard at least) that hydrogen is cheaper at the required scale than batteries. After all we will likely have incredible oversupply during long summer days where electricity is essentially free. Scaling battery manufacturing to store enough power for a whole winter is difficult.
In any case I think storage is something where „let the market figure it out“ is a reasonable strategy.
Round-trip efficiency is not the only variable at play here. Storage plant longevity, self-discharge over very long periods of time, cost of installation and maintenance, cost to the environment to source the raw materials etc also play a big role.
Round trip efficiency might be way less than any other method of storage, but it might win out on all the other points. I don't know the answer though - just saying it's important in discussions like these to not get hung up on single metrics. We're not playing trump cards.
Never meant to imply that, though hydrogen is just a different manner of chemical storage and wildly inefficient. Pumped hydro (gravity storage) is also doing its part, but not really growing in the exponential manner as battery cells[0]. I'd be curious to know if there's any non-'battery' storage technologies that are on a similar growth curve.
Hydrogen is not good for daily storage, where round trip efficiency is important. It is much better for very long term storage or rare event backup, where RTE is much less important.
RTE does become less important as the cost of the input energy declines in comparison to the cost of the storage system.
Exactly. I wouldn't call this article very balanced. It actually is perpetuating a lot of myths about lithium ion batteries popular with the anti renewables pro fossil fuel crowds.
It opens emphasizing the scarcity of lithium. It's actually one of the more common elements on this planet. There is no shortage. We're not going to run out. It's literally everywhere and we've barely scratched the surface looking for rich deposits of it. There are indeed several viable ways to store energy that don't involve using lithium at all.
Flammability is of course called out as well. Never mind that most car and truck fires are good old ICE vehicles. Battery electric fires are so rare that most fire men will never deal with one in their careers. Very much unlike ICE car fires which they deal with on a daily basis. And never mind that there are lots of very safe lithium ion batteries now. LFP is pretty safe for example.
Calling out long duration storage is another red flag. How much of that is needed? In giga watt hours please. Nobody ever bothers to qualify that. It's just asserted that we need stupendous amounts of it and insinuated that we'd need to bankrupt the planet getting it.
As soon as you put numbers on it, it turns into a simple logistics problem. Oh we need X amount of batteries and it's going to cost Y amount of dollars. And of course while people seem to assume that we need stupendous amounts of it we are actually witnessing the effects that very little amounts of short term storage are having already on the electricity markets. It's wiping out coal and gas plants as a viable way to generate power economically. Short term energy storage is a lot cheaper and apparently removing all these plants is not causing any issues as we have still got way more base load than we need. That's another thing that is rarely qualified with a number.
A lot of coal and gas plants are facing early closures because of batteries. Modern gas plants designed to run for many decades that came online only recently are already being replaced by short term battery storage. It's simply cheaper and gas is expensive. With relatively predictable and stable daily cycles of peaks and dips in renewable energy production, short term storage is covering most of what we need.
Batteries are now being produced at a rate measured in TWH per year. Most of those batteries are kept at a high charge rate most of the time. That's a huge amount of untapped potential energy. It's cumulatively going to amount to hundreds of twh of stored energy that we have just sitting there in batteries designed for short term storage distributed all over the place. That's an enormous buffer of energy expanding every year. Only a small fraction of that is cycled on a daily basis.
> Batteries are now being produced at a rate measured in TWH per year
I don't disagree with you, but I think specifically lithium batteries for storage is going to be a small part of the picture as we move towards having larger capacity. Sodium ion batteries in particular remove the resource bottlenecks that still hold back battery storage. That said, yearly additions to grid-scale battery storage (of any type) is basically doubling every year.
To the point, that by some very basic projections I made, it looks like there will be more battery capacity than daily solar generation by 2034, and then more capacity than daily usage less than a year later.
Especially for grid storage sodium ion is looking very promising. As are several other chemistries. But most of the current production is still lithium based for now and it will take time for that to change. I would say non lithium storage might become dominant from the mid 2030s and onward.
As for battery capacity. There will indeed be way more batteries than energy generation. But that's only a problem if you assume all those batteries are being cycled to capacity continuously. IMHO that's actually not the case. Most car batteries don't get drained on a daily basis. It's more like once a week or two weeks for average drivers. Same with grid batteries. They are used more intensively of course but also oversized so they don't constantly run out.
My point was that most batteries are, on average, holding a charge that's probably close to fully charged (or 80%, which is more optimal for some battery chemistries) and that only fraction of that aggregate capacity is discharged and recharged on a daily basis. Having that much batteries is really good news. IMHO it's a trend that will accelerate as batteries continue to get cheaper. We'll just buy more of them and find more places where it's nice to have them. Think of an e.g. AC units with a battery that can charge during the day and discharge in the evening.
As for the IEA, take their numbers with a grain of salt. They are notorious for having to correct their own predictions regularly. And there are some well known issues with their modeling and assumptions. Generally, you can subtract at least a few years from most of their predictions.
I'd recommend reading some of the reports by Bloomberg NEF they've had a few interesting reports on investments for battery production. Apparently we can look forward to over production and price drops next year already.
> But most of the current production is still lithium based for now and it will take time for that to change.
I wager differently. I see no reason why sodium-ion batteries couldn't leapfrog lithium, just based on simplicity and economy. I suspect the learning rate will be much quicker for sodium ion.
> Most car batteries don't get drained on a daily basis. It's more like once a week or two weeks for average drivers. Same with grid batteries.
That's only because grid batteries aren't really being used to offset peakers. They are basically arbitrage for when prices are very high, as lithium batteries can hold charge for a very long time and can be dispatched almost instantly. In terms of batteries being used in place of gas and coal stations, they will need to cycle deeper, but maybe after about 6-12 hours of capacity is reached, they won't have to.
That said, the graph I provided is global capacity. Right now, batteries are still a specialty item, but for broader applicability, they'll be needed in more diverse scenario, including where there could be large gaps in renewables output. But even anywhere, an emergency capacity of days would become necessary in order to divest fully from non-renewables as both baseload and peakers (e.g., when overcast, still, and very cold/hot temperatures, or powerlines failing etc.)
> As for the IEA, take their numbers with a grain of salt. [...] Generally, you can subtract at least a few years from most of their predictions.
My projections were based on historical data, and regressing exponential curves onto them. Not super scientific, but the exponential trends are very visible for solar, wind, and storage. The linear trend for energy consumption seems to be holding now for decades, but that could also change.
> Apparently we can look forward to over production and price drops next year already.
I've already seen the prices drop ~40% from August last year to January on prismatic LiFePo4. I bought twice as many cells for just a little extra. I expect to buy again next year and double my capacity for about the same as my first purchase. We'll see.
Data from the National Transportation Safety Board showed that EVs were involved in approximately 25 fires for every 100,000 sold. Comparatively, approximately 1,530 gasoline-powered vehicles and 3,475 hybrid vehicles were involved in fires for every 100,000 sold: https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/environment-energy-coordinatio...
Statistics from 2015 showed that 174,000 vehicle fires were reported, and almost all of them involved gasoline vehicles. Tesla claims that gasoline cars are 11x more likely to catch fire than a Tesla, and that the best comparison of safety is fires per billion miles driven. If we compare using this method, there are approximately five EV fires for every billion miles traveled, compared to 55 fires per billion miles traveled in gasoline cars: https://driveelectriccolorado.org/myth-buster-evs-fire/
Non-flammable electrolyte: LiFePO4 batteries use a non-flammable electrolyte that does not catch fire even if the battery is punctured or damaged. The electrolyte is a mixture of lithium salts and a solvent that is less volatile and less flammable than the organic electrolytes used in other types of lithium-ion batteries.
High safety: LiFePO4 batteries have a lower risk of overheating and catching fire due to their more stable cathode material and lower operating temperature. They also have built-in protection circuits that prevent overcharge, over-discharge, short-circuit, and physical damage.
That's an interesting set of stats, but it's not decisive. Some alternative explanations:
- The stats are just plain wrong, even at a surface-level inspection. They suggest that over 20yrs you'd have 3 fires for every 10 ICE vehicles ever sold. I ought to know 50 people in my current company who have had a car burn down, 30 in my last company, 5 in my extended family who I'm close with, 100 in a slightly wider net of acquaintances, .... I know 0. I highly doubt _anyone_ in the country comes close to having seen the "right" number of ICE fires, outside of firemen and people who otherwise gravitate toward such problems intentionally.
- The problem mostly isn't gasoline; it's shoddy manufacturing, especially wiring. How do the stats look if you ignore Hyundai and other particularly low quality manufacturers? Normalized by miles driven (which is closer to what ought to be correct), the delta is 10x rather than 100x. That's roughly the delta between how often a BMW breaks down vs a Toyota, so as a coarse estimate you might expect the data to be entirely explained by having the wrong denominator (cars vs miles) and the fact that you're just comparing different tiers of manufacturer.
- Back to the "denominator" issue, which is always a problem with normalized statistics. If your baseline isn't that each car has an equal chance to burn down for each mile driven, but that older cars are more likely to burn down because rust and other degredation allows for water infiltration and electrical fires, the older ICE fleet would naturally generate the reported stats.
- Back to the "denominator" issue, per car sold this year is maybe correct, per car ever sold is maybe correct, per currently running car over 20yo is maybe correct, per mile per one of the previous items is maybe correct, .... You really want to see the stats broken down by those categories, and to help avoid fishing for hypotheses to then come up with other testable ideas to examine for each interesting subcategory you find.
- It's always worth mentioning with EVs that the distributions aren't directly comparable. You have different populations driving the cars in different places from their ICE alternatives. Similarly to the previous point, you want to see results broken down at least by crude demographics. It matters more for self-driving safety claims, but it might be relevant here.
Elaborating slightly on the denominator and population issues:
The reason you care is that these stats aren't just abstract quantities; you're trying to gauge what the impact of a specific intervention might be. Suppose you could magically flip a switch and transition the country to EVs (which I'm not arguing against, just potentially the fire data thing), and you based that decision on this data. You weren't sold before, but since the fire risk is so low you were willing to apply that intervention. Instead of low fire rates, you might see:
1. When EV/EV collisions happen instead of EV/ICE, the higher total energy from heavier vehicles makes short-circuits and fires more likely than your model predicted (this is different from most of the rest of my points since it assumes your model is actually correct and unbiased today in some meaningful way but would still fail to be very helpful).
2. The data was just wrong and thus had no bearing on the real world.
3. You have the same fire rate as shoddy manufacturers enter the mix.
4. You have low rates initially, trending toward the same rate we're at now as the cars degrade, except now those fires are incredibly dangerous and toxic.
5. A mandatory software update while you're driving down the road inadvertently triggers a short circuit, leading to unknown-unknowns potentially affecting large swathes of the population at once (unlikely probably, but you are exposed to new failure modes and don't have a ton of data about the rarer ones yet -- much like (1) this isn't actually a criticism of the stats themselves, just their interpretation).
6. When you get more people driving these things in rural, snowy, mountainous regions you get more collisions and fires.
7. Having more teenagers driving EVs substantially reduces any claimed fire hazard deltas.
And so on. Global stats (like fires per crash, per mile, per car, ...) are suggestive of the next place to look for more data when trying to make an informed decision, but when you're talking about something affecting hundreds of millions of people, they're the beginning of the conversation, not the end. That's doubly true when they obviously have some kind of glaring flaw (like the napkin-math observation that they're off by at least an order of magnitude, probably 2 in this case).
Separately, once that data is interpreted correctly, you'll probably find other important observations. E.g., if ICE and EV have the same fire rate excluding shoddy manufacturers, and you have more solid evidence backing that up, that gives you very easy followups. The conversation can shift to the severity of those fires, their mitigations, and whether they're worth the cost given the other benefits EVs have. Moreover, you learn that you can greatly reduce car fires by just having better engineering, so (carefully and thoughtfully) toss in a law or tax or something to try to encourage better behavior.
Similarly, if you find old vehicles are the root cause then you can encourage recycling or rust-proof coatings. That might even be a point in favor of EVs since the batteries don't last long, so they'll be recycled before they're likely to combust (again, assuming for simplicity that everything else stays constant, which a policy-maker hopefully would not).
Just the stats presented though, especially without evidence that the obvious confounders don't apply, would likely not be helpful in making an informed decision. You could do just as well, perhaps better, from a gut instinct, and the presence of those stats in isolation is (charitably) just to help provide to people the data we do have and encourage further discussion, or (uncharitably) to present decontextualized information in a way that biases the populace in an intended direction, despite the fact that it's useless for the stated goal.
> Calling out long duration storage is another red flag. How much of that is needed? In giga watt hours please. Nobody ever bothers to qualify that.
That includes you. (No numbers just assumptions that all will be fine)
Worth noting that there is no “required” amount of kWh of storage, people can get used to blackouts and/or real time prices spikes and/or adjust habits (reduce usage).
Just to have some numbers:
1kWh of battery costs 139$
US uses 11,267 kWh/year/capita
of electricity alone. Thats 30 kWh per day.
So 1 day electricity storage costs 4000$/capita of investment.
Total energy consumption in US is 295 million BTU/capita/year, which is 236 kWh/capita/day.
To cover for one day of all energy, US needs 32000$/capita/person investment.
In current setting, Oil/Uranium/wood act as a kind of battery, and we are very used to having large “batteries”. (Some people prepare wood for couple of winters ahead)
This article omits one interesting fact about lithium.
'7 Up was created by Charles Leiper Grigg, who launched his St. Louis–based company The Howdy Corporation in 1920. Grigg came up with the formula for a lemon-lime soft drink in 1929. The product, originally named "Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda", was launched two weeks before the Wall Street Crash of 1929. It contained lithium citrate, a mood-stabilizing drug, until 1948.'
Most soft drinks of the day started off as health tonics. Health tonics were popular in the late 19th and early 20th century and were often made by pharmacists and sold in their shops.
That is why we had "soda fountains" in drug stores for much of the 20th century where you could go and have a drink that originally claimed a health benefit but eventually became just a treat.
> Anyone who imagines a future of electric passenger planes, long-duration grid storage and air taxis is conjuring a dream founded on lithium.
Grid storage doesn’t rely so much on density. Sodium-ion batteries would do (as well as the other numerous storage technologies that don’t rely on lithium)