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Using lithium-ion batteries for stationary storage is interesting because their original advantage was all about light weight (lithium is the lightest metal ele

Using lithium-ion batteries for stationary storage is interesting because their original advantage was all about light weight (lithium is the lightest metal element). Now, it seems the development effort devoted to lithium-ion has paid off so well that they are the best OVERALL battery solution. The single-minded effort we put into cell phones and cars is so strong that it now reaches all the way to homes and the grid. To me, this suggests that all sorts of cool technologies might be possible if we as a society could concentrate on making them work.

wongarsu 9y ago
In the last three decades battery technology was mostly about powering small, lightweight gadgets. Now that there's massive amounts of money to be made with car batteries and grid-level storage, I certainly expect some great battery technologies that focus on that in the next decade or two. That's also why I don't care about all these fears about us not having enough lithium: nobody is going to power the world on lithium, it's just the cheapest method right now because of the massive amounts of research money already dumped into it, and great economies of scale. Other technologies will catch up as their use-cases become more valuable.
- StillBored 9y ago
  Yah, lithium's power/weight advantages had driven so much investment that its now has awesome power/volume advantages too. The result is that even things which don't care about the weight (http://www.storagereview.com/apc_backups_pro_500_lithium_ion_review http://www.storagereview.com/apc_backups_pro_500_lithium_ion...) are starting to switch from lead acid because its no longer the super cheap solution. That is something I've found really curious because if you tear into just about any lead acid battery it still looks like technology from the 1950's. Just about everything else has shrunk, become lighter, used less material, etc. But lead acid's last major "breakthrough" was in the 1970's with gel cells. I would have expected lead acid to look more like a capacitor at this point (thin layers of material rolled/folded up) but its still these fairly thick plates sitting in electrolyte with non-existent charge control. Surely some creative person sitting in a lab could come up with way to minimize sulfation or to decompose the lead sulfate within the battery without basically melting them down and building new ones.
- keenerd 9y ago
  > That's also why I don't care about all these fears about us not having enough lithium Who is afraid of that? Take a look at this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth%27s_crust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth... Lithium is #33, estimated at 20 ppm of the crust. We presently mine 64000 tons per year. It is more common than lead, which is #37 and only 14 ppm. Yet we mine 4.8 million tons of lead per year. Now examine boron. #41, 10 ppm and 9.4 million tons per year. Are these unsustainable? Are we on the verge of peak boron and peak lead? Probably not. We have twice as much lithium so we probably aren't going to run out of lithium even if demand increases by a hundred-fold. I am not a geologist, so maybe much of this lithium is more inaccessible than I'm assuming. But everyone who says we are going to run out of lithium have been only looking at the known deposits and are ignoring the possibility that more mines will open to meet demand.
  - wavegeek 9y ago
    Lithium has gone up in price about six fold in the last 15 years and is currently about 4 times as expensive as lead per metric tonne. I suggest that something is wrong with your assessment.
    - jhall1468 9y ago
      Why is there anything wrong with his assessment. Availability affects price, sure, but demand does equally so. Pretty sure lithium has higher demand than lead.
      - neltnerb 9y ago
        Lithium is a lot harder to produce than lead. That's certainly most of the price difference, regardless of abundance in the crust. But statements like this should really be talking about the "economically extractable ore", and it needs to include economic thresholds. There's a price curve there, and I suspect that for lithium it is a steep one because of how complicated its manufacturing is relative to lead. I don't know if we're near the limit though. I don't really buy it personally, I'm much more worried about rare earths.
- aphextron 9y ago
  There is no possibility of ever running out of lithium for battery production. It is an extremely common element, and the actual lithium makes up about 3% of a LiPo cell by mass.
leggomylibro 9y ago
Don't lithium-ion batteries degrade extremely quickly, though? Won't these all be down to half capacity or so within a decade? Is it really worth investing in gargantuan quantities of energy storage if they need to be replaced every few years? I'd be eyeing EDLC technologies or something like molten salts over giant stationary phone/laptop/car/etc batteries.
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  No, they don't degrade that fast. They'll be good for at least 15 years based on charge/discharge cycle data Tesla has collected from vehicles.
- wongarsu 9y ago
  They degrade extremely quickly in the usage pattern of a typical consumer device (alternating between full charge and full discharge). They last fairly long if you keep them between 30% and 80% charge. It's not the most long-lasting technology, but we replace most infrastructure every 20-years already. A 10 year lifetime wouldn't be that bad.
  - HillaryBriss 9y ago
    > They last fairly long if you keep them between 30% and 80% charge wait. does that mean that, effectively, for a careful Tesla owner seeking to maximize battery life, most of the time her practical range will be roughly 70% of the stated value?
    - hwillis 9y ago
      Teslas have a "trip" mode. During normal operation they charge to 80%, but if you put it in trip mode it charges to 100%.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- hwillis 9y ago
  Li-ion batteries have the second slowest self-discharge of any battery and the longest cycle life/easiest upkeep. An li-ion battery will do about 500 discharge cycles from 0-100. They'll do several thousand from 20-80, and tens of thousands cycles from 30-70%. If you have a few days of storage, the battery as a whole will last an incredibly long time even when cycled every day. As for why: When the battery is kept at a high or low voltage, it puts an overpotential on one side or the other of the battery. There's more or less lithium on one side of the battery and it tries to diffuse across the battery very slowly. It never makes it to the other side and reacts with the electrolyte and is lost, reducing capacity. The closer it is to 50%, the less lithium is pulled/pushed out into the electrolyte.
aphextron 9y ago
>Using lithium-ion batteries for stationary storage is interesting because their original advantage was all about light weight (lithium is the lightest metal element). Not entirely. The real killer feature of LiPo which has allowed things like Roadster and Model S to exist is their high discharge, or "C" rating. The power density of LiPo is far beyond any previous chemistry available for batteries at scale. Energy density and power density are two completely different things [0]. https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-power-density-and-energy-density-of-a-battery https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-power-d... [0]
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
Florin_Andrei 9y ago
Li-ion batteries have a high energy density in terms of both weight and volume, when compared to other types of batteries. And yes, it's all relative to which tech you're comparing them to, but it's worth remembering that they are both lightweight and physically small, for the amount of energy they can store.
the8472 9y ago
In principle redox flow batteries should offer better scaling properties for stationary storage, but Li batteries have a process advantage of several years. So the picture might change down the road as long as there is still enough money flowing into alternative research.
- gozur88 9y ago
  I wonder. One of the reasons internal combustion has lasted so long is great boatloads of cash get showered on the technology trying to eke out that last 0.2% of efficiency, and when that's the situation eventually someone has a bright idea that makes a bigger difference. If lithium ends up with the same advantage, other technologies that ought to be better may end up lagging even in the long term.
  - woodandsteel 9y ago
    I see what you are saying. But maybe some big company like Panasonic or Seimens will decide to put the needed bucks into flow batteries. Or maybe China will do what it is doing with PV's and decide to push them hard.
sliverstorm 9y ago
We do this a lot. CCD image sensors are inherently more suited to astrophotography, but so much development has been put into CMOS that it is catching up to (and may surpass) CCD. A single widespread technology, with more applications & development effort, surpasses a better but more niche technology. It's an interesting phenomenon. In the case of batteries, I wonder if we fully account for all the costs though. Lead-acid, for example, is a very sustainable (long-lasting, highly recyclable) battery technology that is inherently suitable, but if the full mining/recycling/disposal costs of lithium-ion are not priced in, the market won't account for this.
cwkoss 9y ago
I've been watching Joel Salatin's talks on his farming methods. Been surprised to hear that there is a huge amount of 'low tech' innovation occurring in farming within the past 50ish years because long-used materials and parts that were historically expensive to produce are now order(s) of magnitude cheaper. - His mobile chicken coops need to be lightweight. Before thin-bladed sawmills, milling lumber to be smaller than ~2" was cost prohibitive as each cut had a 0.25" kerf. Making 1"x1" planks would mean nearly half of the wood goes into the waste pile! - Cheap electric fences allow pastured hog farming to be mobile. Pigs will wreck strong fences, but a lightweight deterrent allows quick placement and removal.
Hasz 9y ago
LiS will be even more popular with grid utilities. Super high specific energy, but low overall discharge weight + low cost of Sulfur means a popular, stationary battery perfect for grid tie in. Ironically, it's even less dense than li-ion. The current issue is commercialization (i.e, doesn't exist) and low conductivity of the sulfur cathode (meaning a low discharge rate to avoid self heating) -- it could be a decade + away.

wongarsu 9y ago

In the last three decades battery technology was mostly about powering small, lightweight gadgets. Now that there's massive amounts of money to be made with car batteries and grid-level storage, I certainly expect some great battery technologies that focus on that in the next decade or two. That's also why I don't care about all these fears about us not having enough lithium: nobody is going to power the world on lithium, it's just the cheapest method right now because of the massive amounts of research money already dumped into it, and great economies of scale. Other technologies will catch up as their use-cases become more valuable.

StillBored 9y ago
Yah, lithium's power/weight advantages had driven so much investment that its now has awesome power/volume advantages too. The result is that even things which don't care about the weight (http://www.storagereview.com/apc_backups_pro_500_lithium_ion_review http://www.storagereview.com/apc_backups_pro_500_lithium_ion...) are starting to switch from lead acid because its no longer the super cheap solution. That is something I've found really curious because if you tear into just about any lead acid battery it still looks like technology from the 1950's. Just about everything else has shrunk, become lighter, used less material, etc. But lead acid's last major "breakthrough" was in the 1970's with gel cells. I would have expected lead acid to look more like a capacitor at this point (thin layers of material rolled/folded up) but its still these fairly thick plates sitting in electrolyte with non-existent charge control. Surely some creative person sitting in a lab could come up with way to minimize sulfation or to decompose the lead sulfate within the battery without basically melting them down and building new ones.
keenerd 9y ago
> That's also why I don't care about all these fears about us not having enough lithium Who is afraid of that? Take a look at this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth%27s_crust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth... Lithium is #33, estimated at 20 ppm of the crust. We presently mine 64000 tons per year. It is more common than lead, which is #37 and only 14 ppm. Yet we mine 4.8 million tons of lead per year. Now examine boron. #41, 10 ppm and 9.4 million tons per year. Are these unsustainable? Are we on the verge of peak boron and peak lead? Probably not. We have twice as much lithium so we probably aren't going to run out of lithium even if demand increases by a hundred-fold. I am not a geologist, so maybe much of this lithium is more inaccessible than I'm assuming. But everyone who says we are going to run out of lithium have been only looking at the known deposits and are ignoring the possibility that more mines will open to meet demand.
- wavegeek 9y ago
  Lithium has gone up in price about six fold in the last 15 years and is currently about 4 times as expensive as lead per metric tonne. I suggest that something is wrong with your assessment.
  - jhall1468 9y ago
    Why is there anything wrong with his assessment. Availability affects price, sure, but demand does equally so. Pretty sure lithium has higher demand than lead.
    - neltnerb 9y ago
      Lithium is a lot harder to produce than lead. That's certainly most of the price difference, regardless of abundance in the crust. But statements like this should really be talking about the "economically extractable ore", and it needs to include economic thresholds. There's a price curve there, and I suspect that for lithium it is a steep one because of how complicated its manufacturing is relative to lead. I don't know if we're near the limit though. I don't really buy it personally, I'm much more worried about rare earths.
aphextron 9y ago
There is no possibility of ever running out of lithium for battery production. It is an extremely common element, and the actual lithium makes up about 3% of a LiPo cell by mass.

leggomylibro 9y ago

Don't lithium-ion batteries degrade extremely quickly, though? Won't these all be down to half capacity or so within a decade? Is it really worth investing in gargantuan quantities of energy storage if they need to be replaced every few years? I'd be eyeing EDLC technologies or something like molten salts over giant stationary phone/laptop/car/etc batteries.

toomuchtodo 9y ago
No, they don't degrade that fast. They'll be good for at least 15 years based on charge/discharge cycle data Tesla has collected from vehicles.
wongarsu 9y ago
They degrade extremely quickly in the usage pattern of a typical consumer device (alternating between full charge and full discharge). They last fairly long if you keep them between 30% and 80% charge. It's not the most long-lasting technology, but we replace most infrastructure every 20-years already. A 10 year lifetime wouldn't be that bad.
- HillaryBriss 9y ago
  > They last fairly long if you keep them between 30% and 80% charge wait. does that mean that, effectively, for a careful Tesla owner seeking to maximize battery life, most of the time her practical range will be roughly 70% of the stated value?
  - hwillis 9y ago
    Teslas have a "trip" mode. During normal operation they charge to 80%, but if you put it in trip mode it charges to 100%.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
hwillis 9y ago
Li-ion batteries have the second slowest self-discharge of any battery and the longest cycle life/easiest upkeep. An li-ion battery will do about 500 discharge cycles from 0-100. They'll do several thousand from 20-80, and tens of thousands cycles from 30-70%. If you have a few days of storage, the battery as a whole will last an incredibly long time even when cycled every day. As for why: When the battery is kept at a high or low voltage, it puts an overpotential on one side or the other of the battery. There's more or less lithium on one side of the battery and it tries to diffuse across the battery very slowly. It never makes it to the other side and reacts with the electrolyte and is lost, reducing capacity. The closer it is to 50%, the less lithium is pulled/pushed out into the electrolyte.

aphextron 9y ago

>Using lithium-ion batteries for stationary storage is interesting because their original advantage was all about light weight (lithium is the lightest metal element). Not entirely. The real killer feature of LiPo which has allowed things like Roadster and Model S to exist is their high discharge, or "C" rating. The power density of LiPo is far beyond any previous chemistry available for batteries at scale. Energy density and power density are two completely different things [0]. https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-power-density-and-energy-density-of-a-battery https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-power-d... [0]

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

Florin_Andrei 9y ago

Li-ion batteries have a high energy density in terms of both weight and volume, when compared to other types of batteries. And yes, it's all relative to which tech you're comparing them to, but it's worth remembering that they are both lightweight and physically small, for the amount of energy they can store.

the8472 9y ago

In principle redox flow batteries should offer better scaling properties for stationary storage, but Li batteries have a process advantage of several years. So the picture might change down the road as long as there is still enough money flowing into alternative research.

gozur88 9y ago
I wonder. One of the reasons internal combustion has lasted so long is great boatloads of cash get showered on the technology trying to eke out that last 0.2% of efficiency, and when that's the situation eventually someone has a bright idea that makes a bigger difference. If lithium ends up with the same advantage, other technologies that ought to be better may end up lagging even in the long term.
- woodandsteel 9y ago
  I see what you are saying. But maybe some big company like Panasonic or Seimens will decide to put the needed bucks into flow batteries. Or maybe China will do what it is doing with PV's and decide to push them hard.

sliverstorm 9y ago

We do this a lot. CCD image sensors are inherently more suited to astrophotography, but so much development has been put into CMOS that it is catching up to (and may surpass) CCD. A single widespread technology, with more applications & development effort, surpasses a better but more niche technology. It's an interesting phenomenon. In the case of batteries, I wonder if we fully account for all the costs though. Lead-acid, for example, is a very sustainable (long-lasting, highly recyclable) battery technology that is inherently suitable, but if the full mining/recycling/disposal costs of lithium-ion are not priced in, the market won't account for this.

cwkoss 9y ago

I've been watching Joel Salatin's talks on his farming methods. Been surprised to hear that there is a huge amount of 'low tech' innovation occurring in farming within the past 50ish years because long-used materials and parts that were historically expensive to produce are now order(s) of magnitude cheaper. - His mobile chicken coops need to be lightweight. Before thin-bladed sawmills, milling lumber to be smaller than ~2" was cost prohibitive as each cut had a 0.25" kerf. Making 1"x1" planks would mean nearly half of the wood goes into the waste pile! - Cheap electric fences allow pastured hog farming to be mobile. Pigs will wreck strong fences, but a lightweight deterrent allows quick placement and removal.

Hasz 9y ago

LiS will be even more popular with grid utilities. Super high specific energy, but low overall discharge weight + low cost of Sulfur means a popular, stationary battery perfect for grid tie in. Ironically, it's even less dense than li-ion. The current issue is commercialization (i.e, doesn't exist) and low conductivity of the sulfur cathode (meaning a low discharge rate to avoid self heating) -- it could be a decade + away.