3 ms·

Liquid-Metal Battery Will Be on the Grid Next Year

3 points by mfiguiere 3y ago

ggm 3y ago
Exciting to see this kind of tech get deployed. "Safe" is understood to be relative: it's a complex high energy system of materials which will have risks. You wouldn't put it next to your kindergarten or the old folks home. But, it's also relatively cheap per kwh and scales well and has good potential to become cheaper.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  The only real question with large scale energy storage is which of the many options will come out on top. I'm concerned about the supply of antimony for this one, though.
  - ggm 3y ago
    It's used industrially, so the supply chains exist for the purposes which consume it but a radical shift in consumption would certainly make for a rocky road. Relative abundance in elements worldwide is always confusing to me because people tend to assume "we don't have enough mines" is equal to "it's scarce worldwide" and coupled to things like "it's called a rare earth so..." it means a bit of misleading beliefs emerge. (Antimony is not a rare earth. I'm arguing from the more general cases of how people talk about minerals) The stats suggest its available pretty much around the world and rates of production being heavy tail to China Russia and Tajikistan don't necessarily mean it's not available elsewhere in quantity. For sure, nobody wants to depend on a supply chain like that right now, politically or economically it would be silly. The web says the US and direct economic allies probably have 10+ years supply in current rates of consumption, Bolivia has pretty healthy reserves. Ramping up antimony production would probably match the other demands of time and investment to ramp up liquid metal battery production. I actually really like that "battery" means so many different ways of chemically or physically storing energy because it means a single point of failure in storage is unlikely. That said, the dependency on the network gets stronger and stronger with the big ones, where small localised microgrids have an upside of lower transmission losses and higher resilience overall (at a cost of some places being islanded) -but they inevitably cost more since the unit cost per kwh can't scale as well. The economics here don't look simple to me: you're trading all kinds of total lifetime costs, and it would be linear programming decision logic of min-max on unrelated "costs" and benefits.
    - pfdietz 3y ago
      I don't know that the quantities available would be sufficient to provide globally relevant amounts of storage. https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2023/mcs2023-antimony.pdf https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2023/mcs2023-antimony.p... Global reserves are > 1.8 million tonnes. Resources aren't given but would be higher. But is that enough? I mean, the 2023 page for lithium lists global reserves at 26 million tonnes, and lithium should be providing more stored energy per unit mass as its atomic mass is so much lower. https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2023/mcs2023-lithium.pdf https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2023/mcs2023-lithium.pd...

3 points by mfiguiere 3y ago

ggm 3y ago

Exciting to see this kind of tech get deployed. "Safe" is understood to be relative: it's a complex high energy system of materials which will have risks. You wouldn't put it next to your kindergarten or the old folks home. But, it's also relatively cheap per kwh and scales well and has good potential to become cheaper.

pfdietz 3y ago
The only real question with large scale energy storage is which of the many options will come out on top. I'm concerned about the supply of antimony for this one, though.
- ggm 3y ago
  It's used industrially, so the supply chains exist for the purposes which consume it but a radical shift in consumption would certainly make for a rocky road. Relative abundance in elements worldwide is always confusing to me because people tend to assume "we don't have enough mines" is equal to "it's scarce worldwide" and coupled to things like "it's called a rare earth so..." it means a bit of misleading beliefs emerge. (Antimony is not a rare earth. I'm arguing from the more general cases of how people talk about minerals) The stats suggest its available pretty much around the world and rates of production being heavy tail to China Russia and Tajikistan don't necessarily mean it's not available elsewhere in quantity. For sure, nobody wants to depend on a supply chain like that right now, politically or economically it would be silly. The web says the US and direct economic allies probably have 10+ years supply in current rates of consumption, Bolivia has pretty healthy reserves. Ramping up antimony production would probably match the other demands of time and investment to ramp up liquid metal battery production. I actually really like that "battery" means so many different ways of chemically or physically storing energy because it means a single point of failure in storage is unlikely. That said, the dependency on the network gets stronger and stronger with the big ones, where small localised microgrids have an upside of lower transmission losses and higher resilience overall (at a cost of some places being islanded) -but they inevitably cost more since the unit cost per kwh can't scale as well. The economics here don't look simple to me: you're trading all kinds of total lifetime costs, and it would be linear programming decision logic of min-max on unrelated "costs" and benefits.
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    I don't know that the quantities available would be sufficient to provide globally relevant amounts of storage. https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2023/mcs2023-antimony.pdf https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2023/mcs2023-antimony.p... Global reserves are > 1.8 million tonnes. Resources aren't given but would be higher. But is that enough? I mean, the 2023 page for lithium lists global reserves at 26 million tonnes, and lithium should be providing more stored energy per unit mass as its atomic mass is so much lower. https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2023/mcs2023-lithium.pdf https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2023/mcs2023-lithium.pd...