WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

China can produce at scale, and produce at very low cast, and that means they can dominate and move global industries and markets unlike any other country.

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Prices for electric vehicle batteries in China are plummeting and the implications, which include everything from cheap grid scale storage and EV’s finally being much cheaper than Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) rivals to the US freaking out, again, about cheap Chinese imports that ruin their own nascent EV battery industry, are just starting to ripple outward for the global automotive market.

Over the last year, the price for Lithium Iron Phosphate, or LFP, battery cells in China has dropped 51% to an average of $53 per kilowatt-hour. The average global price of these batteries last year was $95/kWh.

There are several factors driving prices lower. The first is raw-material prices, which have fallen sharply over the last 18 months. The cathode is where most of the raw-material costs in a battery come from, and the cathode share of total cost for an LFP cell in China has fallen from 50% at the beginning of 2023 to less than 30% this year.

The Future of Electric Vehicles and Mobility, by Keynote Speaker Matthew Griffin

The second driver is overcapacity that’s leading manufacturers to cut prices to maintain market share. China’s battery production is already higher than global Electric Vehicle demand, and that overcapacity problem is set to get worse before it gets better.

Overcapacity tends to lead to competitive shakeouts that shift volume toward the most efficient plants with the newest production technology, while others fall by the wayside. Average capacity utilisation of battery plants in China fell from 51% in 2022 to 43% in 2023, and will be lower again this year.

BloombergNEF’s bottom-up battery cost model shows how close average prices are now to estimated manufacturing costs, indicating that margins for vendors are shrinking.

Raw material costs, overcapacity and margin compression from manufacturers account for the bulk of what’s going on, but there’s also still significant technology and manufacturing process improvements happening. China’s battery champions CATL and BYD continue to invest heavily in research and development, automation and additional factories, and they’re launching new products at a frenetic pace. All these factors together mean that BloombergNEF’s battery team is expecting low prices to persist for at least the next several years.

These ultra-low battery price have major implications for the automotive and power sectors. Battery cells at $50/kWh means the technology to decarbonize most of road transport globally is already here, as opposed to in some future scenario.

Pack-level prices for the most-sold battery chemistries have been below the often-referenced $100/kWh benchmark in China since October 2023, and LFP pack prices are now at $75/kWh. At that price, EVs can be priced at or below combustion cars in most vehicle segments, marking a huge shift. China is the world’s largest auto market, and battery-electric vehicles are currently the cheapest drivetrain by average transaction price in the country, even after stripping out mini city cars from the dataset.

It will take some time for those prices to be fully reflected outside China, but some of that is already happening. Even today, battery prices across different applications are converging as vendors hunt down new sources of demand. That’s good news for commercial EV manufacturers that typically have paid a significant premium for batteries compared the car market.

Almost two-thirds of EVs available in China are already cheaper than their internal combustion engine equivalents, and many cheaper electric models are planned for launch outside China in 2025 and 2026.

The stationary energy-storage market may be the biggest beneficiary. Crashing battery prices make the economics of adding large grid scale energy storage much more attractive. Prices of turnkey energy storage systems are already down 43% from a year ago, and the team at BNEF is watching for that segment to soak up some of the additional supply. Overcapacity isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, but BNEF expects global stationary storage installations to rise to 155 GWh this year, up 61% from last year.

All of this underscores how the harbingers of scarcity were wrong, at least so far. Over the last four years, there was a steady drumbeat of predictions that batteries and battery metals would be in short supply indefinitely.

Toyota was among the most prominent companies to voice this view, claiming just last year that there were not enough batteries to go around, and that sharing them between hybrids was a better way to reduce emissions than deploying full electrics. Those claims look very outdated now as battery prices continue to plunge.

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

As renewable energy is rolled out globally it still needs massive amounts of Grid Scale Storage, and this is Tesla’s largest battery storage by far globally.

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Tesla has secured an absurdly large contract to provide over 15 GWh of Megapack to California’s Intersect Power. The Megapack has become the go-to, poster child product for large-scale energy storage around the globe.

It’s by far Tesla’s fastest-growing product and enabled the company to deploy a record of 9.4 GWh of energy storage last quarter – more than twice the last record.

Now, Tesla has secured its biggest Megapack contract to date and it is absurdly large. Today, Intersect Power announced that it secured a contract for Tesla to provide them 15.3 GWh of Megapacks through the next 5 years.

Intersect Power wrote in a press release: “Tesla and Intersect Power today announced a contract for 15.3 GWh of Megapacks, Tesla’s battery energy storage system, for Intersect Power’s solar + storage project portfolio through 2030. This agreement, when combined with previous commitments, make Intersect Power one of the largest buyers and operators of Megapacks globally with nearly 10 GWh of large-scale energy storage expected to be deployed by the end of 2027.”

As mentioned above, most of that capacity is expected to be deployed within the next 2 years, which means a significant part of Tesla’s capacity, which is currently ramping to 40 GWh per year, is going to go to Intersect.

Intersect currently only “2.2 GW of operating solar PV and 2.4 GWh of grid scale storage in operation or construction.” So this is a big step up for them, but the 10 GWh of projects planned for the next 2 years are reportedly already in the pipeline.

Mike Snyder, Senior Director of Tesla Energy, commented on the new partnership with Intersect: “Intersect continues to be an exceptional partner, and their development expertise combined with the plug-and-play nature of Tesla’s vertically integrated technology enables the speed and scale needed to enhance grid resilience and support greater renewables integration.”

Sheldon Kimber, CEO of Intersect Power, added: “No one in the market can match Tesla’s depth of experience in storage technology. This partnership is the foundation of one of the largest and fastest growing storage portfolios in the country here at Intersect Power. This storage franchise is the perfect complement to our multi-billion dollar expansion of renewable generation that is expected to more than triple the size of our company over the next three years.”

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

Life runs on ATP – the energy molecules of all living things – and now we can convert electricity into ATP it opens the door to new biomanufacturing solutions and also perhaps new grid scale storage solutions.

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The cells of all living organisms are powered by the same chemical fuel: Adenosine Triphosphate (ATP). Now, researchers have found a way to generate ATP directly from electricity, which could turbocharge biotechnology processes that grow everything from food to fuel to pharmaceuticals.

Interfacing modern electronics-based technology with biology is notoriously difficult. One major stumbling block is that the way they are powered is very different. While most of our gadgets run on electrons, nature relies on the energy released when the chemical bonds of ATP are broken. Finding ways to convert between these two very different currencies of energy could be useful for a host of biotechnologies.

Genetically engineered microbes are already being used to produce various high-value chemicals, foods, and therapeutically useful proteins, and there are hopes they could soon help generate greener jet fuel, break down plastic waste, and even grow new foods in giant bioreactors. But at the minute, these processes are powered through an inefficient process of growing biomass, converting it to sugar, and feeding it to the microbes.

Now, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology in Germany have devised a much more direct way to power biological processes. They have created an artificial metabolic pathway that can directly convert electricity into ATP using a cocktail of enzymes. And crucially, the process works in vitro and doesn’t rely on the native machinery of cells.

“Feeding electricity directly into chemical and biochemical reactions is a real breakthrough,” Tobias Erb, who led the research, said in a press release. “This will enable synthesis of energy-rich valuable resources such as starch, biofuels, or proteins from simple cellular building blocks – in the future even from carbon dioxide. It may even be possible to use biological molecules to store electrical energy.”

In nature, ATP and its sister molecule adenosine di-phosphate (ADP) can be thought of as almost like batteries. ATP is like a charged battery, storing energy in its chemical bonds. If a cell needs to spend that energy, it breaks off one of the molecule’s three phosphate groups and the energy bound up in that chemical bond can then power some cellular process.

This process converts the ATP molecule into ADP, which can be thought of as an empty battery. To recharge it, the cell needs to use energy from food or photosynthesis to add a phosphate group back onto the ADP molecule, turning it back into ATP.

But this recharging process relies on a complex sequence of reactions involving various protein complexes embedded in the cell membrane. Re-engineering this system to work outside of a cell is challenging because it requires the various proteins to be carefully orientated in an artificial membrane, which makes it both finicky and fragile.

The new approach, outlined in a paper in Joule, is much simpler. Dubbed the “AAA cycle,” it involves just four enzymes interacting in a solution. The key ingredient that made it all possible was the discovery of an enzyme called aldehyde ferredoxin oxidoreductase (AOR) in a recently-discovered bacterium called Aromaticum aromatoleum, which is able to break down petroleum.

This enzyme is able to take the electrons from an electrode and bind up their energy in an aldehyde bond that is added to a precursor chemical called propionate. This is then cascaded through three more enzymes that act on the chemical and ultimately use the energy stored in it to convert ADP to ATP. At the end, a propionate molecule pops out that can then be fed back into the cycle.

“The simple AAA cycle is a clever and elegant approach…that is much simpler than how biology naturally makes ATP,” Drew Endy, a synthetic biologist at Stanford University, told Science. He added that it could be a key enabler to make “electrobiosynthesis” possible, the idea of using electricity to directly power the synthesis of useful chemicals by cells.

The researchers say the process still needs work, as the enzymes are unstable and only able to convert a small amount of energy. But if the idea can be refined and scaled up, it could make it possible to run all kinds of powerful biotechnology processes on renewable energy, not only making them greener but significantly expanding the amount of energy they can tap into.

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

What if we could integrate grid scale storage solutions into new buildings in new innovative ways?

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Humans have long built towering structures to showcase the power of empires, rulers, religions and corporations. Today, more tall buildings are popping up than ever before. But skyscrapers, as I’ve discussed many times before, could soon have a new purpose – storing renewable energy.

One of the biggest hurdles to a power grid dominated by clean energy is the intermittency of some renewable sources. Sometimes clouds roll in when solar energy is needed, or the wind stops blowing, and turbines can’t generate power – at least not yet although solar panels that work in all lights and conditions are already in the labs. Other times, the sun and wind produce more electricity than is required.

Grid Scale Energy Storage is crucial for balancing generation and consumption. A combination of technologies — from various forms of batteries to other energy storage methods — will likely be necessary to increase capacity.

Enter battery skyscrapers. At the end of May, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), the architecture and engineering firm behind some of the world’s tallest buildings, announced a partnership with the energy storage company Energy Vault to develop new gravity energy storage solutions.

That includes a design for a skyscraper that would use a motor powered by electricity from the grid to elevate giant blocks when energy demand is low. These blocks would store the electricity as “potential” energy. When there is demand, the blocks would be lowered, releasing the energy, which would be converted into electricity.

Tall buildings are SOM’s specialty. It designed New York’s One World Trade Center, Chicago’s Willis Tower, formerly known as the Sears Tower, and the world’s tallest skyscraper, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, which is more than 828 meters (2,700 feet) tall.

“Here’s an opportunity to take this expertise … and use it for energy storage, enabling us to wean ourselves [off] fossil fuels,” Bill Baker, a consulting partner at SOM and structural engineer for the Burj Khalifa.

If the world wants to reach net zero by 2050, grid-scale storage, or technologies connected to the power grid that can store energy and deploy it when needed, will need to be ramped up, according to the International Energy Association.

Lithium-Ion batteries, which are popular for electric vehicles, can’t solve the problem alone. For one, they can’t store energy for long periods.

That may be fine for shifting energy from the sunniest part of the afternoon to the evening, when demand spikes, but energy may need to be stored for longer than that.

Pumped storage hydropower, which is already widely used to store renewable energy, can do that. It entails a turbine pumping water from a reservoir on lower ground to one on higher ground during off-peak hours. When demand spikes, the water is released to flow through an electricity-generating turbine. But it requires hilly terrain and a lot of space.

SOM and Energy Vault’s superstructure tower, which could range from 300 to 1,000 meters (985 to 3,300 feet) in height, would have hollowed out structures resembling elevator shafts for moving the blocks, leaving room for residential and commercial tenants. The firms are also looking at integrating pumped storage hydropower into skyscrapers, using water instead of blocks. Ultimately, multi-gigawatts-hours of energy could be stored, which is enough to power several buildings, said Robert Piconi, the CEO of Energy Vault.

Two energy storage experts questioned if the economics of a skyscraper battery could work, given the space that would need to be used for energy storage and the structural changes that would be needed to support the extra weight. But Energy Vault and SOM are confident their solutions are commercially viable.

Energy Vault has already completed a project in China which it says is the world’s first commercial-scale, non-pumped hydro gravitational energy storage system. The 150-meters-tall (492 feet) building — which has a storage capacity of 100 megawatt hours — is purpose-built to store energy and doesn’t have space for tenants.

Enabling the use of renewable energy would help offset the carbon footprint of supertall buildings. Today, the buildings and construction sector is responsible for almost 40% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

There is work underway to address that, from equipping buildings with better insulation to building with alternative materials that are less carbon-intensive, like timber.

Some buildings are literally getting greener. In Milan, Italian architect Stefano Boeri has created towers covered in trees and shrubs, and he has unveiled a similar design for towers in Dubai.

But buildings are getting taller and more plentiful too, at least partially to meet demand from rapid urbanization, which has driven people into cities, where limited space can mean the best way to build is up.

“Between 1900 and 1999, 235 buildings taller than 200 meters (656 feet) were built globally,” says Daniel Safarik, of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, “and last year, 179 buildings of that height or more were built.”

When it comes to gravity-energy storage structures, the taller the better. A very tall gravity energy storage structure could offset its embodied carbon — from construction and materials — within two to four years.

“If you’re going high in a superstructure anyway, we’re just piggybacking on that,” said Piconi.”

SOM and Energy Vault are now looking for development partners to turn their designs into reality. SOM’s credibility in the tall buildings arena “will help address the challenge of getting the first one built,” said Piconi.

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

Flow batteries have significant advantages over their traditional LIoN battery cousins, and they’re getting better.

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Edinburgh-based energy storage solutions specialist StorTera has developed a long-duration, energy-dense, lithium-sulfur-based Single Liquid Flow Battery (SLIQ). The tech is said to last for 30 years with minimal degradation.

Edinburg-based startup StorTera has developed a SLIQ, which is a a novel, long-duration renewable energy storage system. It combines the advantages of lithium-ion technology – namely, high energy density and rapid response – with the benefits of flow batteries, such as a lower levelized cost of storage.

“By combining the concepts, we have overcome the inherent shortcomings of lithium sulfur battery which have prevented it from being successfully commercialized at scale,” sais StorTera COO Brenda Park.

With an energy density of 250 Wh/L, the SLIQ is touted as the most energy dense flow battery now under development – even more energy dense than those being developed in China who lead the field.

“Due to its high energy density, the SLIQ can replace existing lithium technology in any many applications while providing a much longer lifetime – up to 30 years – with minimal degradation of efficiency,” said Park.

The technology purportedly provides millisecond response times and up to eight hours of energy storage for more than 20 years and a minimum of 7,500 cycles. The system is said to offer improved safety with no cooling requirements and high flash point materials.

“We are striving to make this a truly sustainable battery technology, building a circular economy around it using recovered or recycled raw materials where possible and by making it as reusable as possible,” said Park.

StorTera’s system works by pumping energy-dense single liquid through its proprietary membrane stack to provide long-duration storage. The single liquid design means less system components, whereas low-cost materials and manufacturing techniques further contribute to cost savings. StorTera has a stated goal of reaching capital costs of approximately £120 ($146.20)/kW and £75/kWh when commercialized.

“As it can provide both millisecond response time and long duration energy storage, it is well suited to grid scale applications and/or integration with solar or wind farms,” Park said. “Combined with our intelligent control platform, the SLIQ offers distinct advantages to commercial and industrial applications where it can be optimized continuously according to grid and weather data or by predicting demand peaks.”

In late November, StorTera secured about £5 million from the UK government to help build a large-scale, eight- hour demonstrator of the SLIQ, which will be installed in Edinburgh in 2024. The prototype SLIQ will use a novel cylindrical cell architecture in a modular format to optimize the manufacture, installation, and maintenance of the system.

With a focus on sustainability, the system will use recyclable materials and by-products of the wood industry. Toward the end of the project, eight modular units will be combined to build a 200 kW/1.6 MWh demonstrator SLIQ.

“While developing the SLIQ, we have been providing bespoke small and medium scale lithium ferro phosphate (LFP) battery systems integrated with our intelligent platform to public sector, domestic and commercial customers in the UK. We have also piloted innovative smart grids in the UK and Canada that show the benefits that intelligent energy storage can offer to customers,” Park said. “Our commercial projects are paving the way for the SLIQ when it is commercialized in the next few years.”

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

The world needs alot of energy storage to transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy, and this is a major step forwards.

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One of the most exciting companies in Grid Scale Energy Storage – if you’re the type to get excited about this kind of thing that is– is Form Energy whose innovative Iron-Air battery technology promises to outperform Lithium-Ion (LiON) “big battery” projects for 10% of the cost. And, as the world demands more and more grid scale energy storage batteries, and hunts for alternatives that include everything ironically from Carbon Dioxide to ice and plastic, Form Energy’s new batteries are such big news that now they’re preparing to start production with their own factory.

Form’s grid-scale batteries are built around huge flat iron-air cells, about a meter (3.3 ft) square, around 50 of which are slotted into modules the size of a washing machine and bathed in a liquid electrolyte.

These cells effectively work using the rust cycle; you charge them up by applying energy to iron oxide, turning it back into metallic iron, then add oxygen to initiate the rust process and release energy. Iron is cheap and abundant, making these modules extremely affordable. They last a long time, they’re safe and they’re recyclable; if you tear down a battery you can take the metal out and use it elsewhere. These factors all combine to make them an exceptionally affordable form of energy storage, with a Levelized Cost of Storage (LCoS) more than 10 times lower than LiONbatteries, even before you take the expected lithium resource squeeze into account.

They won’t charge or discharge as quickly as lithium, of course, so they’ll likely work alongside lithium grid batteries in hybrid configurations, the iron-air batteries dealing with longer, slower load demands while the lithium packs handle momentary spikes. Form says that at scale, they’ll deliver more than 3 MW of output capacity per acre, and they’ll excel where energy needs to be stored for around 100 hours or more.

That’s a key vulnerability in any renewable grid; it’s the kind of storage you need when there’s a terrible storm for several days that drastically cuts solar and wind production. Form’s proposition has certainly made a splash with investors; Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures has been on board for some time, along with Luxembourg steel giant ArcelorMittal and many others. A Series E investment round dragged in an impressive $450 million, bringing the company’s total funding over $800 million.

So it’s time to go commercial. Last month, the company announced it had chosen a site for its first American battery manufacturing plant: a 55-acre facility in the city of Weirton, West Virginia. The $760 million project will employ around 750 people, with construction expected to start later this year and the first iron-air batteries to start rolling out in 2024 “for broad commercialisation.”

Source: Form Energy

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

Grid scale storage to balance the energy demands of grids requires massive investment, but what if consumers shouldered almost all of it?

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Boosting the role of renewables in our electricity supply will require a massive corresponding increase in Grid Scale Energy Storage. But new research suggests that electric vehicle batteries could meet short term storage demands by as soon as 2030.

While solar and wind are rapidly becoming the cheapest source of electricity in many parts of the world, their intermittency is still a significant problem. One potential solution is to use batteries to store energy for times when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow, but building enough capacity to serve entire power grids would be enormously costly.

The Future of Energy, by keynote Matthew Griffin

That’s why people have suggested making use of the huge number of batteries being installed in the ever growing global fleet of electric vehicles, a trend often referred to as Vehicle to Grid (V2G). The idea is that when they’re not on the road, utilities could use these batteries to store excess energy and draw from it when demand spikes.

While there have been some early pilots, so far it has been unclear whether the idea really has legs. Now, a new economic analysis led by researchers at Leiden University in the Netherlands suggests that electric vehicle batteries could play a major role in grid-scale storage in the relatively near future.

There are two main ways that these batteries could aid the renewables transition, according to the team’s study published in Nature Communications. Firstly, so-called V2G technology could make it possible to do smart vehicle charging, only charging cars when power demand is low. It could also make it possible for vehicle owners to temporarily store electricity for utilities for a price.

But old car batteries could also make a significant contribution. Their capacity declines over repeated charge and discharge cycles, and batteries typically become unsuitable for use in electric vehicles by the time they drop to 70 to 80 percent of their original capacity. That’s because they can no longer hold enough power to make up for their added weight. Weight isn’t a problem for grid-scale storage though, so these car batteries can be repurposed as we’ve seen Mercedes do.

The researchers note that the Lithium-Ion batteries used in cars are probably only suitable for short-term storage of under four hours, but this accounts for most of the projected demand. So far though, there hasn’t been a comprehensive study of how large a contribution both current and retired electric vehicle batteries could play in the future of the grid.

To try and fill that gap, the researchers combined data on how many batteries are estimated to be produced over the coming years, how quickly batteries will degrade based on local conditions, and how electric vehicles are likely to be used in different countries—for instance, how many miles people drive in a day and how often they charge.

They found that the total available storage capacity from these two sources by 2050 was likely to be between 32 and 62 terawatt-hours. The authors note that this is significantly higher than the 3.4 to 19.2 terawatt-hours the world is predicted to need by 2050, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency and research group Storage Lab.

However, not every electric vehicle owner is likely to participate in vehicle-to-grid schemes and not all batteries will get repurposed at the end of their lives. So the researchers investigated how different participation rates would impact the ability of electric vehicle batteries to contribute to grid storage.

They found that to meet global demand by 2050, only between 12 and 43 percent of vehicle owners would need to take part in vehicle to grid schemes. If only half of secondhand batteries are used for grid storage, the required participation rates would drop to just 10 percent. In the most optimistic scenarios, electric vehicle batteries could meet demand by 2030.

Lots of factors will impact whether or not this could ever be achieved, including things like how quickly vehicle-to-grid infrastructure can be rolled out, how easy it is to convince vehicle owners to take part, and the economics of recycling car batteries at the end of their lives. The authors note that governments can and should play a role in incentivizing participation and mandating the reuse of old batteries.

But either way, the results suggest there may be a promising alternative to a costly and time-consuming rollout of dedicated grid storage. Electric vehicle owners may soon be doing their part for the environment twice over.

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

The ability to store solar energy in batteries for a long time opens up some interesting battery opportunities …

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Solar-powered electronics of all shapes and sizes are one step closer to becoming an everyday part of our lives thanks two recent advances – the ability to generate solar energy from nothing more than the ambient sunlight in an average room, and a “radical” new scientific breakthrough.

In 2017, scientists at a Swedish university created an energy system that makes it possible to capture and store solar energy for up to 18 years, releasing it as heat when needed. Now the researchers have succeeded in getting the system to produce electricity by connecting it to a thermoelectric generator not too dissimilar from the ones now being attached to regular solar panels to let them generate electricity 24/7. Though still in its early stages, the concept developed at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenberg could pave the way for self-charging electronics that use stored solar energy on demand.

The Future of Energy, by keynote Matthew Griffin

“This is a radically new way of generating electricity from solar energy. It means that we can use solar energy to produce electricity regardless of weather, time of day, season, or geographical location,” explains research leader Kasper Moth-Poulsen, Professor at the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Chalmers – imagine never having to buy batteries for your childrens toys ever again and you might suddenly like this breakthrough.

“I’m very excited about this work,” he adds. “We hope with future development this will be an important part in the future energy system.”

Solar energy is a variable renewable because for the most part it, it only works when the sun shines. But technology to combat this much-discussed flaw is already being developed at a fast pace.

Long-term storage of the energy they generate is another matter. The solar energy system created at Chalmers back in 2017 is known as ‘MOST’: Molecular Solar Thermal Energy Storage Systems. The technology is based on a specially designed molecule of carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen that changes shape when it comes into contact with sunlight.

It shape-shifts into an energy-rich isomer – a molecule made up of the same atoms but arranged together in a different way. The isomer can then be stored in liquid form for later use when needed, such as at night or in the depths of winter. A catalyst releases the saved energy as heat while returning the molecule to its original shape, ready to be used again.

Over the years, researchers have refined the system to the point that it is now possible to store the energy for an incredible 18 years. And, as detailed in a new study published in Cell Reports Physical Science last month, this model has now been taken a step further.

The Swedish researchers sent their unique molecule, loaded with solar energy, to colleagues at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. There the energy was released and converted into electricity using the generator they had developed – essentially Swedish sunshine was sent to the other side of the world and converted into electricity in China.

“The generator is an ultra-thin chip that could be integrated into electronics such as headphones, smart watches, and telephones,” says researcher Zhihang Wang from Chalmers University of Technology.

“So far, we have only generated small amounts of electricity, but the new results show that the concept really works. It looks very promising.”

The device could potentially replace batteries and solar cells, fine-tuning the way we use the sun’s abundant energy. The beauty of this closed, circular system is that it works without causing CO2 emissions, meaning it has great potential for use with renewable energy.

The latest UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report makes it overwhelmingly clear that we need to ramp up renewables and switch away from fossil fuels much, much faster to secure a safe climate future.

While significant advances in solar energy like this give cause for hope, the scientists caution it will take time for the technology to become integrated into our lives. A lot of research and development remains before we will be able to charge our technical gadgets or heat our homes with the system’s stored solar energy, they note.

“Together with the various research groups included in the project, we are now working to streamline the system,” says Moth-Poulsen. “The amount of electricity or heat it can extract needs to be increased.”

He adds that even though the system is based on simple materials, it needs to be adapted so it is cost-effective to produce before it can be launched more widely.

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its weaponisation of energy supplies has left Europe short of vital gas supplies so countries are finding new innovative ways to keep their citizens warm this winter.

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A massive steel tower in Berlin, Germany, will serve a similar purpose to a coffee thermos flask this upcoming winter, a report from AP News reveals.

The tower, located on an industrial site near the banks of Berlin’s Spree River, will provide heat to homes using a similar method to thermos flasks. It’s roughly 150 feet (45 meters) tall and holds 14.8 million gallons (56 million liters) of hot water.

The Future of Energy 2050, by Keynote Matthew Griffin

The new facility was unveiled last week at Vattenfall’s Reuter power station. It will be Europe’s largest heat storage facility once it’s completed at the end of the year. It’s worth noting that a bigger version is already planned for construction in the Netherlands.

According to the developer of the tower, utility company Vattenfall, it will heat Berlin homes this winter even if Russia cuts off gas supplies due to Western sanctions following its invasion of Ukraine.

“It’s a huge thermos that helps us to store the heat when we don’t need it,” said Tanja Wielgoss, who heads the Sweden-based company’s heat unit in Germany. “And then we can release it when we need to use it.”

Check out the latest in heating technology

“Sometimes you have an abundance of electricity in the grids that you cannot use anymore, and then you need to turn off the wind turbines,” she continued. “Where we are standing we can take in this electricity.”

The facility cost taxpayers 50 million Euros ($52 million), and it will have a thermal capacity of 200 megawatts. The tank can keep water insulated for up to 13 hours and can meet most of Berlin’s hot water needs during the summer. During winter, though, it will meet roughly 10 percent of Berlin’s hot water requirements.

The Berlin tower will have the double benefit of reducing reliance on Russian gas supplies and also reducing emissions used to heat water when needed. The facility holds water brought to close to boiling temperature by electricity from German solar and wind power plants. When renewable energy exceeds demand it can go towards heating the tower as an innovative form of grid scale energy storage.

The post Germany is building colossal urban thermos flasks to heat homes this winter appeared first on 311 Institute.

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

Renewables don’t generate electricity 247 – yet – so we need a way to store energy cheaply so it can be returned to the grid when its needed.

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In the quest to find a better way to store power for the grid, an Italian startup is turning to an unlikely source: carbon dioxide. The company, called Energy Dome, has built a test facility to put the greenhouse gas to work in energy storage.

Renewable power has been growing worldwide, but sources like wind and solar aren’t available consistently, yet – even though we can already see a point in time when solar panels can generate electricity 247 irrespective of the light conditions or weather – creating a need for storage solutions.

The Future of Energy 2050, by speaker Matthew Griffin

Today, most large-scale energy storage uses Lithium-Ion (LiON) batteries, which are expensive, or pumped hydropower, which is only available in certain places. Cheap energy storage systems that can be deployed anywhere could unlock new potential for renewable power.

Energy Dome thinks carbon dioxide could have a role to play. The company says its demonstration plant, where it has designed and begun trials, will soon be able to safely and cheaply store energy using carbon dioxide sourced from commercial vendors.

Compressing gases to store energy isn’t new: for decades, a few facilities around the world have been pumping air into huge underground caverns under pressure and then using it to generate electricity in a natural gas power plant. But Energy Dome turned to carbon dioxide because of its physics.

Learn more about the technology

Carbon dioxide, when squeezed to high enough pressures, turns into a liquid, which air doesn’t do unless cooled down to ultra-low temperatures. The liquid carbon dioxide can fit into smaller steel tanks close to where renewable energy is generated and used.

In Energy Dome’s designs, a flexible membrane holds the carbon dioxide in a huge dome at low pressure. When excess electricity is available, the gas goes through a compressor to reach high pressure. This process also generates heat, which is stored too.

Then, when energy is needed, the stored heat is used to warm up the carbon dioxide, which decompresses and turns a turbine, generating electricity.

Energy Dome’s CEO, Claudio Spadacini, says its first full-scale plants should cost just under $200 per kilowatt-hour (kWh), compared with about $300 per kWh for a lithium-ion energy storage system today. Spadacini says that the costs could drop further, to about $100 per kWh, if the company is able to scale up to a few dozen large facilities.

The concept of compressed carbon dioxide storage is “really promising,” says Edward Barbour, an energy systems researcher at Loughborough University in the UK. However, he expects the company to face some significant engineering challenges, like keeping the heat exchangers working for the decades-long lifetime of the plant.

The demonstration facility where Energy Dome recently started trials has a capacity of 4 megawatt-hours, enough to power the average American home for about four and a half months. Spadacini says that after the demonstration facility is running, Energy Dome will move quickly to 200-MWh commercial-scale plants, aiming to begin construction as early as next year at a site in Italy.

The engineering challenges are “not insurmountable, but they’re not insignificant,” Barbour says. That means that the timelines Spadacini has quoted for scale-up might not be feasible, Barbour cautions: “I think there are kinks to be worked out that might take a little bit longer.”

The post This startup wants to use Carbon Dioxide battery to store energy for the grid appeared first on 311 Institute.