The battery is probably the least attractive technology to date. This is especially true in the Department of Materials Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where there is a lab dedicated to building and testing the next transformative energy storage device that can easily be mistaken for just a storage room.
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In that narrow lab, Donald Sadoway, the silver-silver chemist, was looking for plastic components that looked like children looking for specific Lego bricks. He placed two objects on the table, and they were about the size and shape of the cans, which looked like a book town.
No wonder the battery is hard to bring people's interest. But these towns—the batteries—can be the technology that revolutionizes our energy systems.
The battery is not just boring. Honestly, they are still very bad. To say good things, the batteries that help our daily lives are invisible heroes – they are integrated into important items such as smartphones, computers, and cars. It is not good to say that they are expensive, bulky, flammable, difficult to handle properly, prone to failure in cold environments, and easily ooze corrosive fluids. As devices that get energy from them become thinner and smarter, the battery is still waiting for the next upgrade. As we all know, the performance of a computer processor can double every two years; and the battery can only increase by a few percentage points every two years.
Early prototype of the battery developed by Sato.
However, the future will be the era of battery power. This is imperative. From electric vehicles to industrial-scale solar power plants, batteries will be the key to a cleaner, more efficient energy system – the sooner we achieve this, the sooner we can no longer exacerbate climate change.
However, our current batteries - mostly lithium-ion batteries - are not good enough. Some progress has been made in this area: energy storage costs have fallen by half in the past five years, and more and more large companies are investing heavily in this technology, such as Tesla's Gigafactory superbattery plant. But from the perspective of large-scale economic transformation, lithium-ion batteries are still too expensive. They are quite powerful in our everyday equipment, but once they are scaled up, they are prone to overheating and even explosions.
Perhaps the biggest problem with lithium-ion batteries is that they wear out slowly. Think about it, your mobile phone battery will change from consumption to 1% and then back to 100% after several years. This process of deep discharge and charging can cause damage to the battery and can degrade the performance of the battery.
Therefore, we have long been welcoming new batteries, and researchers around the world are vying to help us achieve this, and all kinds of technologies are striving to stand out. Some of the ideas are very novel – not too attractive, but absolutely amazing. For example, a liquid battery, a molten metal battery that operates at a temperature comparable to that of a car engine, and a battery that uses brine as a raw material.
This is part of a new competitive landscape.
Why is the battery important?
A good battery needs to meet several requirements, but two things are essential: reliability and cheap.
Eric Rohlfing, deputy director of the Advanced Energy Research Program (ARPA-E), which is responsible for identifying and funding cutting-edge R&D projects, said, "The biggest problem with batteries is cost." Nature A 2012 survey by the magazine found that Americans are only willing to spend about $13 more per month to ensure that the entire US electricity supply is based on renewable energy. Therefore, the battery can not significantly increase people's electricity bills.
For the utility sector, that means that the cost per kWh of the grid-level energy storage system provided cannot exceed $100. Since the establishment of the US President in 2009, ARPA-E has invested a total of $85 million to develop new batteries that can achieve that goal.
Rolfin said, "People say that I am crazy." According to an electric vehicle battery study published in Nature, for an industry that has not been close to the cost of $700 per kWh since its birth, the target figure is simply low. absurd. Rolfin said that now, although still not possible, $100 per kWh is the standard goal of the entire industry. If you can do this below, then you are not only very competitive - you can still win everything.
That is to say, a good battery that can win the market is this: a cleaner, more reliable energy system that does not rely on fossil fuels and is more powerful to start.
Every time you fluctuate the lighting switch, you are connected to a huge invisible network: the transmission network. Somewhere, at the other end of the high-voltage transmission line that delivers electricity to your home, power plants (perhaps burning coal, with or using increasingly popular natural gas) generate electricity to replace the electricity that you and others have just used up. .
Our grid power needs to be carefully maintained at all times – whether it's too much power or too little power, it can cause problems. Grid operators need careful observation and prediction to determine how much power the power plant should produce per hour or even per minute. But sometimes they make mistakes, which requires the power plant to make timely adjustments to make up the difference.
Fortunately for us, the grid is a huge interconnect system, so we rarely notice the quality or quantity of electricity. Imagine the difference between stepping into the bucket and stepping into the ocean. In a small system, the balance between supply and demand changes is obvious – the water in the bucket overflows. But because the grid is so large – like the ocean – changes in it are often undetectable. We will only pay attention when the problem is relatively large, because the surrounding lights are extinguished.
Renewable energy is less manageable than coal-fired or gas-fired power plants – if people's electricity demand suddenly soars, you can't power a solar power plant. Solar energy peaks during the day, during which time it changes due to changes in the clouds, and it disappears at night. Wind energy is even more unpredictable. If there are too many such intermittent phenomena in the power grid, it will be more difficult to balance the power supply and demand, and power outages will become more frequent.
Energy storage is a safe solution. If you can store excess energy somewhere and then extract it from there when the supply is getting smaller again, you can use renewable energy to power much more, even if the weather is not clear, the wind is not blowing up. . In addition, the grid itself will become more stable and efficient, because the battery allows communities and regions to manage their own power supply. Our aging and taxed power infrastructure will go even further. You can get power during off-peak hours, store it in a battery, etc., when needed, so you don't have to lay new transmission lines in areas where the transmission line is close to the maximum transmission capacity.
In this way, the bucket can become more like the ocean. That means – at least in theory – that power generation and power storage are more dispersed, the use of renewable energy is increasing, and the reliance on large power plants burning fossil fuels is reduced.
This is why the battery is so important.
Crazy thoughts
Sato, at her office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told me that "batteries are in the power supply chain, like refrigerators in our food supply chain."
The containers he showed me were early prototypes of the "liquid metal battery" he started researching 10 years ago.
"I started to study the battery, just because I am very obsessed with the car." Sato. (His desktop background is an old-fashioned sports car he sold a few years ago. He kept the photo to commemorate the car, just like someone else commemorating the pet at home.) In 2005, he tested a Ford one. The early electric car was deeply fascinated by it. "At the time I realized that we didn't have an electric car because we didn't have the right battery."
Therefore, Sato is beginning to ponder and build the right battery. He was involved in the work of refining aluminum, so he wondered if it could be a template for creating alternative new batteries. Smelting aluminum is a very cheap energy-consuming process through which pure metals can be obtained by boiling. But if that one-way process can speed up, it can loop back, and perhaps a lot of energy flowing into the molten metal can be stored there.
To some extent, that's a crazy idea—the molten battery must run at 880 degrees Fahrenheit, which is close to the temperature of the car's combustion chamber. But this can also be said to be a very simple concept, at least for electrochemical homes. Originally assembled with a liquid metal battery, it was only necessary to put a metal plug composed of two alloys of different densities into a container and then cast some salt thereon. When the battery is energized, the two pieces of metal melt and are automatically split into two layers, like salad oil floating on vinegar. The molten salt forms a layer between the two and conducts back and forth.
But Sadowi said that although it was just full of hope, developing new technologies was an extremely slow process. Early funding from ARPA-E and the French oil giant Total helped him start practicing his ideas, but it took years to build new technologies, and long-term research and development was costly. Venture capitalists are generally reluctant to invest in long-term engineering projects. After all, there are a large number of software startups that can quickly pay them back.
Sato Verdo said, “In any capital-intensive industry, the industry itself will hinder technological innovation.†He said that the investment of existing battery companies is mostly used to maintain existing operations, and thus will not bring innovation to the industry. How much help. He pointed out that lithium-ion electronics were born outside the original battery industry; the next generation of batteries will do the same.
The molten metal battery has already left the underground laboratory. year 2010. Savage and several former students founded battery company Ambri and later headquartered a manufacturing facility in Marlborough, 30 miles west of Cambridge. Today, Ambri has about 40 employees and is busy building prototypes of battery packs with hundreds of molten metal batteries.
Savage said that Ambri was less than a year away from deploying its first commercial model, and everything has been improving so far. At its manufacturing facility, some of the test batteries have been in operation for nearly four years, but there have been no signs of wear and tear. It is tricky to run a battery pack containing 432 individual units. But after solving some of the problems through heat sealing, the battery packs are able to reach sustainable operating temperatures, enough to support their charging and discharging without any additional energy input. Ambri is currently undergoing a new round of financing, new financing Will be enough to help it enter production mode.
As I walked out of the office door, I said that despite all the difficulties and delays in launching, the battery looks very close to the market. "I hope so." Sato.
Intense competition
The molten metal battery is not the only moon-lit battery project, nor is it a leader in the competition. Other technologies are moving forward in a low-key manner, from "iron-flow batteries" to zinc-air and lithium-air batteries.
Like Sato's projects, many of these untested technologies initially relied on funding from ARPA-E. ARLF-E's Rolfin said, "These are very early high-risk technologies. So we spread the fishing nets."
One of the most promising competitors in the next-generation battery competition is Pittsburgh-based Aquion. Its founder, Carnegie Mellon University professor Jay Whitacre founded the company in 2008. The cheapest and most reliable battery ever.
Their products are called "saline batteries." It looks more like a rubbermaid container filled with sea water. All materials in the Aquion battery are readily available materials, from salt to stainless steel to cotton. In addition, none of those materials poses the same risks as lithium-ion batteries.
Matt Maroon, director of product management at Aquion, said, "The chemicals we use are very simple and our battery materials are not as flammable, toxic or corrosive."
Aquion's battery is also very easy to assemble. “Our main manufacturing assembly equipment comes from the food packaging industry.†Maruen said, “It is a simple pick-up robot you can see at Nabisco, which can be used to place cookies in blister packs.â€
Aquion batteries have been on the market for nearly three years, and home and power plant-scale facilities can be deployed. In a total of 250 different locations around the world, Aquion batteries have a total storage capacity of 35 MWh. Among them, a deployment in Hawaii has been running for two years; last year, the battery and solar system powered several buildings for six months, without the need for diesel generators.
“We need to put more of these products into use,†Rolfin said. “Now, if I am a utility or grid operator and want to buy an energy storage battery, I would want to buy a product that offers a 20 year warranty. We are now The technologies discussed have not yet reached that stage."
However, they are approaching that stage. Another project funded by ARPA-E, Energy Storage Systems ("ESS"), announced in November last year that it will deploy one of its current-flow batteries as part of a micro-grid experiment for the Army Corps of Engineers in Missouri. ESS also deployed batteries to power an off-grid organic brewery in Napa Valley, California – Aquion also deployed batteries for the brewery. As more and more such one-off experiments succeed – more such new batteries prove their worth – the possibility of a battery-powered energy system becomes a reality and is closer.
But is it possible that the battery will become cool in the future? This is a more difficult problem. Aquion's Matt Marouen has been working in the battery industry since he graduated from college in 2002. He used to be the youngest person to attend various industry conferences. At first he thought that he would definitely not be able to dry the battery for the rest of his life.
Fifteen years later, he is still working in the battery industry – but he is no longer the youngest in the conference room. More students are beginning to get involved in the battery industry, and people are beginning to notice the importance of the industry. “It’s still not as cool to do this for Apple,†he said. “But I think people recognize the importance of this industry, which makes it a bit cool.â€
"Or I hope so." He laughed. "I have a 9-year-old daughter. So I want to do something that she would feel cool, that is my ultimate goal."
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