Grid storage is going to be big business in the future, on the order of size of storage for electrical vehicles. (And these will certainly not be mutually exclusive markets! Vehicle to grid tech will become widespread, as is already seen in the new F150 Lightning truck). Lithium ion will dominate for the foreseeable future, as the industry has scaled to massive sizes and already, and has the advantage of being currently unstoppable in the EV space.
Batteries with a design that can decouple the energy from the power ratings, like this one, will be able to address parts of the market that lithium ion cannot. And if the cost per MWh of additional energy is cheap, and round trip efficiency stays above 50% or so, that sort of battery will have a huge edge in a part of the market that currently has no clear winners.
There are many competitors in the non-lithium ion storage space, but one of the top contenders to watch is Form energy, which has a rust-based battery, and is rumored to have a cost as low as $20/MWh, about a tenth of that of lithium ion.
> one of the top contenders to watch is Form energy, which has a rust-based battery.
Form is still in the cell prototyping stage, as best I can tell - maybe not even that. There's zero information on their website about where they are in the development process or really anything substantial about their design.
Competition in the market is certainly a good thing, but Form needs to do more than just have a shiny website, a screengrab of a zoom employee meeting, and a blog with 'industry insight' posts (because they have nothing to show for tech/product.)
Agreed that Form has lots of hype, but that's one thing that can be needed in addition to working tech. Utility decision makers are not the best at adding new tech to the grid or dealing with innovation. Having some big industry names and the support of the business press that the utility execs and shareholders read is it's own form of currency when dealing with such archaic businesses.
Form has no working tech, as evidenced by the total absence of any mention of it. No specs, no pictures, no test installations, no whitepapers, nothing.
I have been saying for years that we should have a windmill system you could place on top of a building or home that powers a larger, highspeed flywheel buried underground below the house. Ideally with the flywheel in vacuum and balanced by magnets for reduced friction. This ensures no loss converting energy types (mechanical to mechanical) and it can be used later for electricity or other energy in small, large bursts (sort of like a capacitor). You would still want batteries for energy storage but this would drastically increase the lifespan of those batteries by reducing stress on their chemistry. Batteries really do not like to discharge in short, high intensity bursts. There are flywheel based UPS systems that work sort of in a similar principle and they have much longer maintenance intervals vs a battery type UPS>
I think both battery and solar tech has advanced to the point that solar plus batteries undercut a lot of grid supplied energy in costs.
Or at least it would, if the overhead for current solar installers wasn't so high. Retail prices for equipment are incredibly low, but the boom-and-bust cycle caused by uncertain regulatory terrain ends up requiring successful biz to have massive marketing costs, which results in really high prices overall.
I still believe that's why the U.S. invaded anyway. We didn't care about overtaking a country for some silly resistance leader. You do it for big money to bilk - like Iraq and oil.
But we left without taking any lithium. At some point second and third order hypotheticals are just conspiracy theories. There is no evidence we invaded Afghanistan to get lithium, and at the time (2001), we were not worried about lithium shortages or grid storage.
Like others I don't think that that's why the US invaded, but I do think it had something to do with the enormous shit-fit thrown by the DC foreign policy / national security / defense commentariat when we pulled out of Afghanistan last summer.
Lithium Ion is not sustainable for the long term - we have neither the materials nor the manufacturing to not only keep up what would be required for full scale car and grid uses, but don't forget Lithium Ion batteries have a finite lifespan and need to be replaced. The more you put into service, the more you have to manufacture beyond just the batteries needed for new requirements.
I'm not sure that your predictions will hold here. More lithium is discovered as demand grows, and there have been huge additions to known reserves in just the past few years. Looking at current numbers and saying "that's it" is clearly wrong, and given its overall abundance and lack of demand until now, it's a really strong prediction to say that we won't have enough for at least 500TWh of storage, if not more.
Manufacturing capacity is expected to increase 10x every five years, with roughly 20-30TWh/year production in 2031. I can't think of any fundamental constraints there, could you specify why that can't increase?
Lithium recycling is being planned by nearly all manufacturers and many countries will mandate it. If lithium supplies are short, recycling will be highly profitable. If lithium is super abundant, recycling may be more expensive than recycling, and a program like what we currently use for lead acid batteries might be needed for a circular economy. But the fundamental point is that end of life for the battery does not mean that the lithium is gone, it's not a fuel.
How did you collect this odd set of concerns? Did you think of them or did you find them in the media somewhere?
It's all a question of economics. I think technologies like the one in this article, or the one I think holds the best long term promise - super capacitors - are far more likely to displace lithium ion batteries before all that infrastructure you describe scales out. Recycling a battery pack out of a car like a Tesla is far different than recycling a traditional led acid battery from a car. Recycling the quantity of batteries required to support the grid at scale is even more of a non-trivial problem. And if recycling isn't economically viable because lithium is so abundant what do you do with the spent batteries? Bury them?
Especially for electric cars - without something like a supercapacitor or hydrogen that can charge quickly and doesn't have massive battery pack replacement costs built in to the total cost of ownership equation, electric cars are not going to become mainstream; they will remain fringe oddities.
I don't think Lithium is going away tomorrow - but I think it's crazy to bank on it for all our future needs or pitch it for grid storage. If it was so viable for grid storage then where are the really large deployments at scale? As you point out its mature tech. Someone would have scaled up production and done it already if it was such a no brainer. If Elon thought he could make more money at it than cars or space do you not think he would already be there focusing on it vs. those other ventures? Heck at one point Elon was thinking of doing his own candy but didn't since he didn't find anything really revolutionary enough to separate his potential offering from what was already out there. So it's not like he has a super narrow focus only on what he's already working on, and he already has a ton of in-house knowledge about lithium ion batteries.
That a company with as high knowledge of lithium battery tech like Tesla is only tangentially focused on grid power solutions instead of heavily diving in is, I think, one of the larger tells out there. And do you think Tesla would still be as successful if it didn't have substantial tax incentives? That's a distortion that's often overlooked when talking about overall economic viability.
There is far more than just raw resource availability or basic manufacturing capabilities at play here - and grid scale requirements just amplify those issues. I dunno why so many people are so eager to hand wave the limited lifetime of chemical batteries but it's a significant issue; any tech that doesn't have 100% replacement over a short fixed lifetime is going to beat the pants off of chemical batteries over the long haul. It isn't even remotely close. Utilities think in 50 year lifetimes, not 5. These aren't solutions for cars; this is base infrastructure that's COSTLY. There is probably some maintenance with these compressed air solutions, but I'm pretty confident it's no where near that of being forced to replacing the most expensive part of your entire storage solution every X years.
Just look at the value of a used electric cars vs. new. As people are learning about battery pack replacement costs or especially with Tesla, limited options on repair/partial replacement and probably loosing access to supercharging(one of the biggest reasons to pick Tesla right now), used prices on electric cars have steadily declined (and that's being a bit polite). When you have someone blowing up a used Tesla because they feel it's not economically viable to replace the battery pack, that' an issue that shouldn't just be hand waved away https://carbuzz.com/news/fed-up-tesla-owner-blows-up-his-mod...
All of this is in its infancy, but chemical batteries are already in a pretty deep hole from an economics perspective. Unless there is a breakthrough on preventing dendrite formation that dramatically (dramatically!) increases the lifespan of chemical batteries they are a transitory but not long term solution.
Supercapacitors aren't without their issues. You can fill them up instantly (if you have the means to move that much energy that quickly!) but they can also discharge all their energy instantly - which is a great way to also describe a bomb. So things like that will have to be worked out to make them safe - but I see that as far less of a problem than dealing with the perpetual churn of chemical batteries.
Batteries with a design that can decouple the energy from the power ratings, like this one, will be able to address parts of the market that lithium ion cannot. And if the cost per MWh of additional energy is cheap, and round trip efficiency stays above 50% or so, that sort of battery will have a huge edge in a part of the market that currently has no clear winners.
There are many competitors in the non-lithium ion storage space, but one of the top contenders to watch is Form energy, which has a rust-based battery, and is rumored to have a cost as low as $20/MWh, about a tenth of that of lithium ion.