9 ms·

I was quite excited by compressed air storage when Lightsail came into the picture almost 5-7 years ago. Sadly, they could not make the economics work and ended

I was quite excited by compressed air storage when Lightsail came into the picture almost 5-7 years ago. Sadly, they could not make the economics work and ended up pivoting into a company that sells carbon fibre tanks for high-pressure storage. As someone who follows the energy space closely, Lithium ion batteries now have so much momentum and $$$ pumped into them via R&D work, it's going to be hard for competing energy storage technologies to catch up. Flywheel and hydrogen fuel-cell also often come up but I think we're at a point now where batteries are going to take off simply because of their wide area of applicability. With that economy of scale costs will drive down and even more research and $$$ will flow.

at-fates-hands 8y ago
My concern with batteries is we're so gung ho on producing these, we haven't stopped to consider the environmental impact from the manufacturing process or the incredible task of recycling these once they've outlived their usefulness. It reminds me a lot of when people pushed plastic for everything in order to save the trees and reduce paper consumption. Some 40 years later, we're now trying to get off plastic and dealing with massive environmental issues surrounding nearly every kind of plastic.
- batbomb 8y ago
  Do you think it’s better or worse than the initial mining?
- lr 8y ago
  This guy actually goes to a lithium "mine" in the middle of the desert... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KX2qw79qpk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KX2qw79qpk
- linsomniac 8y ago
  Back in the late 1800s, city planners met to try to come up with some plan for dealing with "the manure problem". Large cities couldn't handle the amount of manure produced by the horses in the city. They ended the meeting early, because they couldn't come up with any sort of plan. Then cars came along and they were all like "Yay! The pollution problem is solved!" I too wonder what the impact of so many lithium batteries is going to be. I mean, I know they are saying that they are extremely recyclable, and I hope that's true. But I wonder what the unintended consequences of this switch is going to be.
  - Cthulhu_ 8y ago
    We can look at the current (used) battery market, the disposable Duracell thingies and such. I think there's a good recycling program for them, but even so, part of used batteries end up getting lost and in landfills and such.
  - Davertron 8y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9gnvZLkewg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9gnvZLkewg
    - ballenf 8y ago
      (That's the silicon valley clip explaining the London manure problem being solved by the replacement of horses with cars.) Maybe it's just me, but not a fan of bare links unless the URL is descriptive.
    - at-fates-hands 8y ago
      Not economical to recycle Lithium right now. Recycled lithium is as much as five times the cost of lithium produced from the least costly brine based process. It is not competitive for recycling companies to extract lithium from slag, or competitive for the OEMs to buy at higher price points from recycling companies. Though lithium is 100% recyclable, currently, recycled lithium reports to the slag and is currently used for non-automotive purposes, such as construction, or sold in the open-markets. However, with the increasing number of EVs entering the market in the future and with a significant supply crunch, recycling is expected to be an important factor for consideration in effective material supply for battery production. Closed loop recycling, where the recycled materials are sold back to OEMs, is likely to help against potential price fluctuation of metals or compounds. EV battery recycling is expected to play a significant part of the value chain by 2016 when large quantities of EV batteries will come through the waste stream for recycling. https://waste-management-world.com/a/1-the-lithium-battery-recycling-challenge https://waste-management-world.com/a/1-the-lithium-battery-r...
- jdietrich 8y ago
  >we haven't stopped to consider the environmental impact We have. We've painstakingly analysed the energy and material inputs and the pollution outputs of the entire lifecycle of a lithium battery pack. After considering all these factors, lithium batteries remain an attractive energy storage option. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-48768-7_11 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-48768-7_... >the incredible task of recycling these once they've outlived their usefulness Recycling lithium battery packs is complex and hazardous, but no more so than a multitude of other industrial processes. There is already substantial recycling capacity, thanks in part to the EU's WEEE directive. Using existing technologies, only 1% of the pack mass goes to landfill. We can't yet recover all of the lithium in a useful form, but we can recover most of the cobalt. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9781118991978.hces221 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/978111899197...
joncrane 8y ago
Aren't flywheels used in datacenters to cover the split second between when the power goes out and the generators kick on?
- Diederich 8y ago
  The various datacenters I've had such in-depth knowledge of over the years all used a big battery for that.
- chrisa 8y ago
  I toured a datacenter 5 years ago or so - and yes, they had a big flywheel for temporary power loses (until they could get the generators running)
  - walshemj 8y ago
    That's only if they don't /cant run the entire DC of battery -whilst the gensets come online this is how telco exchanges / central offices work and important ones may have power supplied via different routes.
- nrtd 8y ago
  I know about the RRZN where this is done.
- patrickg_zill 8y ago
  Only some of them have flywheels. The large telco datacenter I visited had huge pallets of batteries to cover the time needed for the diesel generator to start.
  - walshemj 8y ago
    Might be more a telco thing as they tend to regard serious outrages as a one every one or two generations as just about acceptable.
- gargravarr 8y ago
  Some DCs do, but the need to keep them spinning 24/7/365 is a big maintenance issue, so given the advances in battery tech, I'd assume batteries would supplant flywheels for cost and safety reasons.
al2o3cr 8y ago
I suspect large-scale fixed installations are more likely to end up using some kind of flow battery: https://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/fuel-cells/its-big-and-longlived-and-it-wont-catch-fire-the-vanadium-redoxflow-battery https://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/fuel-cells/its-big-and-... The big advantage there is independent scaling: peak discharge is tied to the total membrane area / pumping capability while capacity is tied to the amount of reactants that can be stored.
- russdill 8y ago
  I'm pretty excited about the potential benefits of flow batteries. Hopefully they can get the tech to work economically for grid storage.
throwaway5752 8y ago
There's a video somewhere of a failing flywheel, it's a fairly energetic explosion. I follow the energy space, also, and ... while I didn't expect Li batteries to have grid scale roles, I didn't think flywheels were going to succeed there. They have properties more like ultracapacitors (discharge rate suitable for continuous backup, clean up messy grid sine waves). I thought pumped air/pumped water was more likely because it scaled up so well and was old tech. Fuel cells, too, seems to fall more into the backup/spot generation/remote generation+NG access niches. Looking on the bright side, anything that drives Li efficiency/density research is probably a very good thing.
- 3pt14159 8y ago
  The core insight for me was when Musk talked about how little the cost of Li mattered in the unit economics of Li batteries. It was something like 3% of the cost. The rest of it was mostly manufacturing costs. With so much room for improvements at scale and so many potential applications, it seemed like a sure winner.
  - bdamm 8y ago
    That's a very useful insight. My "aha" moment came during a lecture given by DARPA at PARC about 5 years ago, outlining how wasteful current battery technology is in terms of density entirely because of safety requirements. They had at the time over a dozen different research projects on ways to improve density by changing how safety is achieved. It is only a matter of time until some of them get to market, and in fact I believe one of them has. They were all 2x-10x improvements.
    - hinkley 8y ago
      There’s a kind of Moore’s law in batteries, but the multiplier looks more like inflation than 2x. Any tech that falls outside of the growth curve seems to run into issues with production or cost that delay it until it fits under the curve. Something cheaper and easier gets picked first. The first modern EVs had lead acid batteries. More sophisticated than your starter battery, sure, but lead acid all the same. Which is why Tesla was a big deal. We talked about LiPo for something like fifteen years before it showed up in consumer electronics, and then they started catching on fire. All of this stuff is painfully slow. The big story in EVs is how crazy efficient the motors can get. A company I used to follow (whose name is escaping me now) had a motor that was 95% efficient in its sweet spot. They had scaled up the design to 100 HP.
pythonaut_16 8y ago
In a sense then you could say it's the Javascript of energy storage. Not the best on technical merits alone, but good enough along with a massive force of investment and wide adoption.
- matthewmcg 8y ago
  I think the surname of John B. Goodenough, one of the early Li-ion pioneers, is apt for the status of the technology.
  - zdkl 8y ago
    I'll be damned, this wasn't a troll. Today I learned... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Goodenough https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Goodenough
maliker 8y ago
Flow batteries are looking pretty good. Costs are coming down, and the very high (some say unlimited) cycle life could give an advantage over Li-ion for stationary applications. On the other hand, used Li-ion from electric vehicles could be so widely available that they also win for stationary storage. Interesting times.
iamgopal 8y ago
Just yesterday I was talking to my friend regarding this. The key idea is, humans are really good at driving the price down to bare material cost via agressive production line automation. For e.g. without all the automation including subpart a single phone with all the technology would easily cost upwards of billion. So comparing ANY technology regarding their future prospects, we can easily deduct that which ever can be made fully automatically in production line will thrive in the end. ( Compare solar cell with all other renewable technology. Sooner or later energy produced by solar cell will bypass all other combined by tenfold or more.)
- Gibbon1 8y ago
  > are really good at driving the price down to bare material cost via aggressive production line automation I've noticed this with steel products and plastics. Brings up one advantage batteries have, they are small. That you need to make a trillion of them works directly towards the cost being a small percentage over material and energy inputs.
naravara 8y ago
>As someone who follows the energy space closely, Lithium ion batteries now have so much momentum and $$$ pumped into them via R&D work, it's going to be hard for competing energy storage technologies to catch up. Flywheel and hydrogen fuel-cell also often come up but I think we're at a point now where batteries are going to take off simply because of their wide area of applicability. With that economy of scale costs will drive down and even more research and $$$ will flow. I've been surprised by the development honestly. 15 years ago I assumed heavy industry and automotive would make the big decisions about what energy storage tech we go with and the rest of the economy would follow suit and start working with either hydrogen fuels cells, supercapacitors, kinetic storage, or chemical batteries based on the R&D they did. Instead it's been consumer electronics that led the way and heavy industry is stuck with chemical batteries because that's what worked best on an MP3 player.
- vosper 8y ago
  Don't rule out hydrogen just yet - at least not for cars (and then using your car as a generator to power your home): http://www.thedrive.com/tech/14431/are-hydrogen-cars-the-next-big-thing-again http://www.thedrive.com/tech/14431/are-hydrogen-cars-the-nex...
  - mattygh 8y ago
    I'd be very surprised if hydrogen vehicles work out. Hydrogen is not a source but rather a store of energy like a battery is. There's a few practical and technical issues: 1 it would require building out entirely new infrastructure, running up against severe NIMBYism at this point. It's incredibly hard to even build new power lines right now. Try a highly combustible, very leaky gas. 2 it's far cheaper to just strip H2 from natural gas, which releases carbon (unless you capture it, increasing cost), so not carbon free unless you force using electrolysis from renewable power sources 3 Electrolysis efficiency is ~70%, fuel cell efficiency is ~60%, so round trip efficiency is <50%. Much more waste than a battery (~80%). You're both using essentially the same electricity to create the power, but hydrogen is wasting more of it, so will necessarily be more expensive 4 in vehicles, fuel cells end up charging the battery toi power the motor anyway, so the energy loss from the battery is a wash The one thing they have is range and speed to refuel, but as batteries get cheaper and better that will be minimized before H2 gets big enough to take over. There's lots of big companies with smart people who are still pushing for this so hopefully they know what they are doing (mostly in Japan it seems)
jacquesm 8y ago
There is still one more possible alternative, if only we can get the physics to work: room temperature super conduction. That - if it ever comes to fruit - is going to cause a whole pile of revolutions and unlike most other ideas that rest upon unobtanium actually has a chance of success.
- cwkoss 8y ago
  How would room temperature super conduction be used for energy storage? Or would it just make all of the other technologies much more efficient?
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    Energy storage in superconducting loops. This is done on a small scale already for ride-through and power stabilization purposes but it is expensive due to the non-room temperature super conducting technology used which requires cooling down the superconductor.

at-fates-hands 8y ago

My concern with batteries is we're so gung ho on producing these, we haven't stopped to consider the environmental impact from the manufacturing process or the incredible task of recycling these once they've outlived their usefulness. It reminds me a lot of when people pushed plastic for everything in order to save the trees and reduce paper consumption. Some 40 years later, we're now trying to get off plastic and dealing with massive environmental issues surrounding nearly every kind of plastic.

batbomb 8y ago
Do you think it’s better or worse than the initial mining?
lr 8y ago
This guy actually goes to a lithium "mine" in the middle of the desert... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KX2qw79qpk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KX2qw79qpk
linsomniac 8y ago
Back in the late 1800s, city planners met to try to come up with some plan for dealing with "the manure problem". Large cities couldn't handle the amount of manure produced by the horses in the city. They ended the meeting early, because they couldn't come up with any sort of plan. Then cars came along and they were all like "Yay! The pollution problem is solved!" I too wonder what the impact of so many lithium batteries is going to be. I mean, I know they are saying that they are extremely recyclable, and I hope that's true. But I wonder what the unintended consequences of this switch is going to be.
- Cthulhu_ 8y ago
  We can look at the current (used) battery market, the disposable Duracell thingies and such. I think there's a good recycling program for them, but even so, part of used batteries end up getting lost and in landfills and such.
- Davertron 8y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9gnvZLkewg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9gnvZLkewg
  - ballenf 8y ago
    (That's the silicon valley clip explaining the London manure problem being solved by the replacement of horses with cars.) Maybe it's just me, but not a fan of bare links unless the URL is descriptive.
  - at-fates-hands 8y ago
    Not economical to recycle Lithium right now. Recycled lithium is as much as five times the cost of lithium produced from the least costly brine based process. It is not competitive for recycling companies to extract lithium from slag, or competitive for the OEMs to buy at higher price points from recycling companies. Though lithium is 100% recyclable, currently, recycled lithium reports to the slag and is currently used for non-automotive purposes, such as construction, or sold in the open-markets. However, with the increasing number of EVs entering the market in the future and with a significant supply crunch, recycling is expected to be an important factor for consideration in effective material supply for battery production. Closed loop recycling, where the recycled materials are sold back to OEMs, is likely to help against potential price fluctuation of metals or compounds. EV battery recycling is expected to play a significant part of the value chain by 2016 when large quantities of EV batteries will come through the waste stream for recycling. https://waste-management-world.com/a/1-the-lithium-battery-recycling-challenge https://waste-management-world.com/a/1-the-lithium-battery-r...
jdietrich 8y ago
>we haven't stopped to consider the environmental impact We have. We've painstakingly analysed the energy and material inputs and the pollution outputs of the entire lifecycle of a lithium battery pack. After considering all these factors, lithium batteries remain an attractive energy storage option. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-48768-7_11 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-48768-7_... >the incredible task of recycling these once they've outlived their usefulness Recycling lithium battery packs is complex and hazardous, but no more so than a multitude of other industrial processes. There is already substantial recycling capacity, thanks in part to the EU's WEEE directive. Using existing technologies, only 1% of the pack mass goes to landfill. We can't yet recover all of the lithium in a useful form, but we can recover most of the cobalt. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9781118991978.hces221 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/978111899197...

joncrane 8y ago

Aren't flywheels used in datacenters to cover the split second between when the power goes out and the generators kick on?

Diederich 8y ago
The various datacenters I've had such in-depth knowledge of over the years all used a big battery for that.
chrisa 8y ago
I toured a datacenter 5 years ago or so - and yes, they had a big flywheel for temporary power loses (until they could get the generators running)
- walshemj 8y ago
  That's only if they don't /cant run the entire DC of battery -whilst the gensets come online this is how telco exchanges / central offices work and important ones may have power supplied via different routes.
nrtd 8y ago
I know about the RRZN where this is done.
patrickg_zill 8y ago
Only some of them have flywheels. The large telco datacenter I visited had huge pallets of batteries to cover the time needed for the diesel generator to start.
- walshemj 8y ago
  Might be more a telco thing as they tend to regard serious outrages as a one every one or two generations as just about acceptable.
gargravarr 8y ago
Some DCs do, but the need to keep them spinning 24/7/365 is a big maintenance issue, so given the advances in battery tech, I'd assume batteries would supplant flywheels for cost and safety reasons.

al2o3cr 8y ago

I suspect large-scale fixed installations are more likely to end up using some kind of flow battery: https://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/fuel-cells/its-big-and-longlived-and-it-wont-catch-fire-the-vanadium-redoxflow-battery https://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/fuel-cells/its-big-and-... The big advantage there is independent scaling: peak discharge is tied to the total membrane area / pumping capability while capacity is tied to the amount of reactants that can be stored.

russdill 8y ago
I'm pretty excited about the potential benefits of flow batteries. Hopefully they can get the tech to work economically for grid storage.

throwaway5752 8y ago

There's a video somewhere of a failing flywheel, it's a fairly energetic explosion. I follow the energy space, also, and ... while I didn't expect Li batteries to have grid scale roles, I didn't think flywheels were going to succeed there. They have properties more like ultracapacitors (discharge rate suitable for continuous backup, clean up messy grid sine waves). I thought pumped air/pumped water was more likely because it scaled up so well and was old tech. Fuel cells, too, seems to fall more into the backup/spot generation/remote generation+NG access niches. Looking on the bright side, anything that drives Li efficiency/density research is probably a very good thing.

3pt14159 8y ago
The core insight for me was when Musk talked about how little the cost of Li mattered in the unit economics of Li batteries. It was something like 3% of the cost. The rest of it was mostly manufacturing costs. With so much room for improvements at scale and so many potential applications, it seemed like a sure winner.
- bdamm 8y ago
  That's a very useful insight. My "aha" moment came during a lecture given by DARPA at PARC about 5 years ago, outlining how wasteful current battery technology is in terms of density entirely because of safety requirements. They had at the time over a dozen different research projects on ways to improve density by changing how safety is achieved. It is only a matter of time until some of them get to market, and in fact I believe one of them has. They were all 2x-10x improvements.
  - hinkley 8y ago
    There’s a kind of Moore’s law in batteries, but the multiplier looks more like inflation than 2x. Any tech that falls outside of the growth curve seems to run into issues with production or cost that delay it until it fits under the curve. Something cheaper and easier gets picked first. The first modern EVs had lead acid batteries. More sophisticated than your starter battery, sure, but lead acid all the same. Which is why Tesla was a big deal. We talked about LiPo for something like fifteen years before it showed up in consumer electronics, and then they started catching on fire. All of this stuff is painfully slow. The big story in EVs is how crazy efficient the motors can get. A company I used to follow (whose name is escaping me now) had a motor that was 95% efficient in its sweet spot. They had scaled up the design to 100 HP.

pythonaut_16 8y ago

In a sense then you could say it's the Javascript of energy storage. Not the best on technical merits alone, but good enough along with a massive force of investment and wide adoption.

matthewmcg 8y ago
I think the surname of John B. Goodenough, one of the early Li-ion pioneers, is apt for the status of the technology.
- zdkl 8y ago
  I'll be damned, this wasn't a troll. Today I learned... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Goodenough https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Goodenough

maliker 8y ago

Flow batteries are looking pretty good. Costs are coming down, and the very high (some say unlimited) cycle life could give an advantage over Li-ion for stationary applications. On the other hand, used Li-ion from electric vehicles could be so widely available that they also win for stationary storage. Interesting times.

iamgopal 8y ago

Just yesterday I was talking to my friend regarding this. The key idea is, humans are really good at driving the price down to bare material cost via agressive production line automation. For e.g. without all the automation including subpart a single phone with all the technology would easily cost upwards of billion. So comparing ANY technology regarding their future prospects, we can easily deduct that which ever can be made fully automatically in production line will thrive in the end. ( Compare solar cell with all other renewable technology. Sooner or later energy produced by solar cell will bypass all other combined by tenfold or more.)

Gibbon1 8y ago
> are really good at driving the price down to bare material cost via aggressive production line automation I've noticed this with steel products and plastics. Brings up one advantage batteries have, they are small. That you need to make a trillion of them works directly towards the cost being a small percentage over material and energy inputs.

naravara 8y ago

>As someone who follows the energy space closely, Lithium ion batteries now have so much momentum and $$$ pumped into them via R&D work, it's going to be hard for competing energy storage technologies to catch up. Flywheel and hydrogen fuel-cell also often come up but I think we're at a point now where batteries are going to take off simply because of their wide area of applicability. With that economy of scale costs will drive down and even more research and $$$ will flow. I've been surprised by the development honestly. 15 years ago I assumed heavy industry and automotive would make the big decisions about what energy storage tech we go with and the rest of the economy would follow suit and start working with either hydrogen fuels cells, supercapacitors, kinetic storage, or chemical batteries based on the R&D they did. Instead it's been consumer electronics that led the way and heavy industry is stuck with chemical batteries because that's what worked best on an MP3 player.

vosper 8y ago
Don't rule out hydrogen just yet - at least not for cars (and then using your car as a generator to power your home): http://www.thedrive.com/tech/14431/are-hydrogen-cars-the-next-big-thing-again http://www.thedrive.com/tech/14431/are-hydrogen-cars-the-nex...
- mattygh 8y ago
  I'd be very surprised if hydrogen vehicles work out. Hydrogen is not a source but rather a store of energy like a battery is. There's a few practical and technical issues: 1 it would require building out entirely new infrastructure, running up against severe NIMBYism at this point. It's incredibly hard to even build new power lines right now. Try a highly combustible, very leaky gas. 2 it's far cheaper to just strip H2 from natural gas, which releases carbon (unless you capture it, increasing cost), so not carbon free unless you force using electrolysis from renewable power sources 3 Electrolysis efficiency is ~70%, fuel cell efficiency is ~60%, so round trip efficiency is <50%. Much more waste than a battery (~80%). You're both using essentially the same electricity to create the power, but hydrogen is wasting more of it, so will necessarily be more expensive 4 in vehicles, fuel cells end up charging the battery toi power the motor anyway, so the energy loss from the battery is a wash The one thing they have is range and speed to refuel, but as batteries get cheaper and better that will be minimized before H2 gets big enough to take over. There's lots of big companies with smart people who are still pushing for this so hopefully they know what they are doing (mostly in Japan it seems)

jacquesm 8y ago

There is still one more possible alternative, if only we can get the physics to work: room temperature super conduction. That - if it ever comes to fruit - is going to cause a whole pile of revolutions and unlike most other ideas that rest upon unobtanium actually has a chance of success.

cwkoss 8y ago
How would room temperature super conduction be used for energy storage? Or would it just make all of the other technologies much more efficient?
- jacquesm 8y ago
  Energy storage in superconducting loops. This is done on a small scale already for ride-through and power stabilization purposes but it is expensive due to the non-room temperature super conducting technology used which requires cooling down the superconductor.