7 ms·

Vanadium: The metal that may soon be powering your neighbourhood

145 points by Libertatea 12y ago

Sami_Lehtinen 12y ago
Only good thing is that it can take a lot of charge cycles, otherwise it's worse on all aspects, than even traditional lead-acid batteries.
- jarvist 12y ago
  No, it's a reflow battery - meaning you can make the capacity arbitrarily large (literally you have a tank of one redox, a tank of another). Hopefully this will make it much cheaper for large capacities. Yes, it's heavy for the capacity, but this does not matter for fixed installations. Number of charge cycles & recycle-ability makes an enormous difference to the balance of systems cost for a battery.
  - shabble 12y ago
    I wonder how stable the "charged" state solution is? Could you charge it up in one location, and truck/ship/pump it somewhere else for consumption? Imagine refitting crude oil supertankers to handle the acidity and ship solar power from some remote coastal desert to more useful places. Other than the headmelting price of Va, it could conceivably be cheaper than building transmission lines & their associated resistance losses. (I'm probably missing some key fact of why this wouldn't work. But it's a nice idea)
    - ScottBurson 12y ago
      That would be so much less efficient than transporting hydrocarbon fuels as to be pointless.
ape4 12y ago
Do Brits really say "bungs dinner in the microwave" ?
- orf 12y ago
  I think "bungs" is interchangeable, but yes.
- vacri 12y ago
  Antipodeans, too. Without the 's' - the 's' is just an artifact of how the sentence in the article reads. 'bung' just means 'casually put somewhere'. "Where do you want this box?" => "Just bung it on the table"
- leoc 12y ago
  'bung' equates to 'chuck'.
- moreati 12y ago
  Yes. The S depends on the conjugation - I bung ... He/she bungs ... They bung ...
Nanzikambe 12y ago
(Disclaimer: I know very little about either Vanadium or the alternatives I will suggest, so these are the opinions of a lay person on the subject) Why is yet another mineral we have to mine, then presumably buy from an industry that will become another iteration of today's energy giants, the solution? What is wrong with present methodologies of energy storage? For example using surplus power to pump water up hill, to later recuperate during peak hours? Or heating water? Things of that vein that're obviously not efficient, but trivial enough to implement for single buildings (whether a house or a sky scraper) without needing any change to infrastructure. To be clear, what I'm against here is the creation of demand for yet another substance we'll despoil the planet some more for. Mines are festering wounds upon the planet. And I seriously doubt harvesting sea creatures will lead to anything more than the same sort of damage inflicted upon a seabed already scarred by dragnets. Edit: From reading further, and to answer my own question, the problem is that all research in this field is geared towards the identification of materials or energy sources that can be commoditised.
- Nanzikambe 12y ago
  "Metallic vanadium is not found in nature, but vanadium compounds occur naturally in about 65 different minerals. Economically significant examples include patronite (VS4),[26] vanadinite (Pb5(VO4)3Cl), and carnotite (K2(UO2)2(VO4)2·3H2O). Much of the world's vanadium production is sourced from vanadium-bearing magnetite found in ultramafic gabbro bodies. Vanadium is mined mostly in South Africa, north-western China, and eastern Russia. In 2010 these three countries mined more than 98% of the 56,000 tonnes of produced vanadium.[27] Vanadium is also present in bauxite and in fossil fuel deposits such as crude oil, coal, oil shale and tar sands. In crude oil, concentrations up to 1200 ppm have been reported. When such oil products are burned, the traces of vanadium may initiate corrosion in motors and boilers.[28] An estimated 110,000 tonnes of vanadium per year are released into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels.[29] Vanadium has also been detected spectroscopically in light from the Sun and some other stars.[30]" "Vanadium metal is obtained via a multistep process that begins with the roasting of crushed ore with NaCl or Na2CO3 at about 850 °C to give sodium metavanadate (NaVO3). An aqueous extract of this solid is acidified to give "red cake", a polyvanadate salt, which is reduced with calcium metal. As an alternative for small-scale production, vanadium pentoxide is reduced with hydrogen or magnesium. Many other methods are also in use, in all of which vanadium is produced as a byproduct of other processes.[31] Purification of vanadium is possible by the crystal bar process developed by Anton Eduard van Arkel and Jan Hendrik de Boer in 1925. It involves the formation of the metal iodide, in this example vanadium(III) iodide, and the subsequent decomposition to yield pure metal.[32]" Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium#Occurrence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium#Occurrence So not only is extracting this stuff going to involve mining, the process of extraction itself relies on extremely toxic substances, and the most economic areas to mine it are places it's less than prudent to rely upon economically (China, Russia, South Africa)
planckscnst 12y ago
Knight describes the color changes as the vanadium is reduced - yellow -> green -> blue -> violet as the vanadium receives electrons from the zinc. But then later, he describes the battery. "In one tank, the vanadium releases electrons, turning from yellow to blue." At least one of these statements are incorrect.
- avn2109 12y ago
  >> "One of these statements are incorrect" One _or more_ are incorrect :)
  - thomasvarney723 12y ago
    "At least one of these statements are incorrect."
- mikexstudios 12y ago
  See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium#Compounds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium#Compounds The latter statement is incorrect, but it's an easy to make mistake. What he probably meant was that "in one tank, the vanadium releases electrons, turning from blue to yellow while in the other tank, vanadium accepts electrons, turning from yellow to blue."
giarc 12y ago
The article states that peak demand is the evening... I would have thought peak demand would have been during the day when large factories are operating at peak output.
- jarvist 12y ago
  Large industrial users don't vary their demand much, and actually change when they use it to fit the demand curves (i.e. Aluminium smelters). Peak in the UK is early evening, when people are still working late & also people returning home (electric trains), heating houses, dinner, doing laundry etc. http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/
  - zhte415 12y ago
    This is an amazingly hands-on dashboard. Together with handy tips on why and when peaks and troughs occur. For example I had no idea UK wind potential (potential) capacity was so close to nuclear.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 12y ago
      Yep, and look at the graphs. Look at the yearly graph at the bottom, nuclear output averages 6.0 - 7.0GW, wind output averages about 2.0 - 2.5GW over a 12 month period, for about the same nameplate capacity (installed nameplate capacity: Wind 8GW; Nuclear 12GW - close enough to support the following argument). This means we have to overbuild wind capacity by a factor of about 3 to 4 in order to match nuclear / coal / gas. Now have a think about how much steel and concrete are required to build 1GW of wind base load capacity compared to 1GW base load nuclear. You need to build, say, 3x 640MW reactors to achieve 1GW continuous output, so 1 reactor can be offline for refuelling or maintenance at any one time, while the other two are run at 80% capacity. To achieve 1GW of base load wind you need to build 3 to 4GW nameplate capacity, and even then the wind doesn't blow all the time, so you need widely dispersed wind, plus storage because sometimes the wind doesn't blow anywhere in the UK for days on end - the currently weekly graph shows this: wind has been producing approximately 0GW output for most of the last week. Also, wind needs long new transmission lines, (large) nuclear can be a drop in replacement for existing coal plants as they are retired, or built next / close to existing transmission lines. There are plenty of resources on the web that will help you discover the materials inputs for different generating technologies, see bravenewlcimate.com particularly [1] for example. Regardless of what technology we choose moving forward, to achieve zero emissions by 2050 would require a war-like rollout, starting now. But wind and solar are at least a couple of magnitudes of order more materials-intensive than nuclear / coal / gas for the same base load output. And there probably aren't that many sites suitable for wind, especially ones that don't require 1000km new transmission lines. I'm not against renewables per se, I'm just for math. The idea of 'renewable resources' appeals to me. But until the math magically changes, I don't see how wind and solar (with or without storage) is a good idea, either environmentally from the materials-input perspective, or economically from the end-users perspective. What we need to push us forward technologically is large amounts of cheap / free zero emissions -when generating- electricity. Another strike against wind and solar is this: if either was so attractive economically then large investment funds would have flooded the market with the technology. But it isn't, which speaks directly about the ROI (Return on Investment), which is derived from materials input and running cost per dollar return. The only way it makes sense economically to build wind and solar is if the price of electricity goes up, which is ideal if you want people to freeze to death or die of heat stroke, or make your electric car uneconomical to run. I think that UK National Grid Status webpage is the best example of wind not working as a solution to electricity supply, unless you define the problem as "how to make expensive unreliable electricity" a la Germany and Denmark [2], who have the highest wind electricity generation in Europe and the most expensive electricity in Europe [3]. I may have waffled on more than I originally intended. 1. http://bravenewclimate.com/2009/10/18/tcase4/ http://bravenewclimate.com/2009/10/18/tcase4/ 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_European_Union http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_European_Unio... 3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_pricing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_pricing Edit: speeling nd grama
XorNot 12y ago
I've been hearing about these types of batteries for years (they were developed at UNSW where I attended) but the technology has been unviable ever since then. The problem, near as I can tell, is that even with the benefits, vanadium is still too expensive. It would cost ~$80,000 or more in conc. vanadium for storing 100 kwH - just enough energy to keep a house safely off the grid. To that price you have to add the solar system to charge it, the cell stack, the conc. H2SO4 you have to dissolve the vanadium in etc. We need to get way cheaper then that before we can get serious about this - ideally cheap enough that we can encourage everyone to have a cell stack in their house that offsets their peak loads. That would open up some real options.
- stcredzero 12y ago
  How about $100,000 per a couple dozen houses?
ender7 12y ago
I suppose it's my turn to link to another effort in this area, liquid salt batteries: http://www.ted.com/talks/donald_sadoway_the_missing_link_to_renewable_energy http://www.ted.com/talks/donald_sadoway_the_missing_link_to_... They have the advantage of being much cheaper to manufacture, but I don't know how their energy density stacks up.
- afarrell 12y ago
  http://www.ambri.com/ http://www.ambri.com/ is the company that is bringing this tech to production. Also, Donald Sadoway is a great teacher.
- comboy 12y ago
  I remember watching this tedtalk. Very nice. Is anything known about the progress they made since then?
inportb 12y ago
> ... peak demand for electricity, which generally comes in the late afternoon and evening, when everyone travels home, turns on the lights, heating or air conditioning, boils the kettle, bungs dinner in the microwave, and so on Related video: http://www.bbc.co.uk/britainfromabove/stories/people/teatimebritain.shtml http://www.bbc.co.uk/britainfromabove/stories/people/teatime...
callesgg 12y ago
You Will still lose some 20 + 20% due to charge and discharge inefficiencies. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium_redox_battery http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium_redox_battery
discreteevent 12y ago
From the article in reference to sea squirts that digest vanadium: "Having committed themselves to this life of tedium, they also digest their redundant brains" . --- There are times in life where being able to do this temporarily would certainly be a relief :)
- johnzim 12y ago
  I think that's what boozahol is for
- EdwardCoffin 12y ago
  This is the subject of a classic joke about tenure: “The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain anymore, so it eats it! It's rather like getting tenure.” http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/52415-the-juvenile-sea-squirt-wanders-through-the-sea-searching-for http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/52415-the-juvenile-sea-squir...
stephenmm 12y ago
While researching this I found a tremendous resource that goes in to pretty good depth of all the alternatives for grid level storage: http://www.sbc.slb.com/SBCInstitute/Publications/~/media/Files/SBC%20Energy%20Institute/SBC%20Energy%20Institute_Electricity_Storage%20Factbook_vf.ashx http://www.sbc.slb.com/SBCInstitute/Publications/~/media/Fil...
zvrba 12y ago
Interesting. Vanadium is relatively abundant too; Wikipedia places it on 20th place, ahead of more known and very widely used elements like chromium, nickel and zinc, copper and tin (on the 49th place!). This might be viable for mass-production.

145 points by Libertatea 12y ago

Only good thing is that it can take a lot of charge cycles, otherwise it's worse on all aspects, than even traditional lead-acid batteries.

jarvist 12y ago
No, it's a reflow battery - meaning you can make the capacity arbitrarily large (literally you have a tank of one redox, a tank of another). Hopefully this will make it much cheaper for large capacities. Yes, it's heavy for the capacity, but this does not matter for fixed installations. Number of charge cycles & recycle-ability makes an enormous difference to the balance of systems cost for a battery.
- shabble 12y ago
  I wonder how stable the "charged" state solution is? Could you charge it up in one location, and truck/ship/pump it somewhere else for consumption? Imagine refitting crude oil supertankers to handle the acidity and ship solar power from some remote coastal desert to more useful places. Other than the headmelting price of Va, it could conceivably be cheaper than building transmission lines & their associated resistance losses. (I'm probably missing some key fact of why this wouldn't work. But it's a nice idea)
  - ScottBurson 12y ago
    That would be so much less efficient than transporting hydrocarbon fuels as to be pointless.

ape4 12y ago

Do Brits really say "bungs dinner in the microwave" ?

orf 12y ago
I think "bungs" is interchangeable, but yes.
vacri 12y ago
Antipodeans, too. Without the 's' - the 's' is just an artifact of how the sentence in the article reads. 'bung' just means 'casually put somewhere'. "Where do you want this box?" => "Just bung it on the table"
leoc 12y ago
'bung' equates to 'chuck'.
moreati 12y ago
Yes. The S depends on the conjugation - I bung ... He/she bungs ... They bung ...

Nanzikambe 12y ago

(Disclaimer: I know very little about either Vanadium or the alternatives I will suggest, so these are the opinions of a lay person on the subject) Why is yet another mineral we have to mine, then presumably buy from an industry that will become another iteration of today's energy giants, the solution? What is wrong with present methodologies of energy storage? For example using surplus power to pump water up hill, to later recuperate during peak hours? Or heating water? Things of that vein that're obviously not efficient, but trivial enough to implement for single buildings (whether a house or a sky scraper) without needing any change to infrastructure. To be clear, what I'm against here is the creation of demand for yet another substance we'll despoil the planet some more for. Mines are festering wounds upon the planet. And I seriously doubt harvesting sea creatures will lead to anything more than the same sort of damage inflicted upon a seabed already scarred by dragnets. Edit: From reading further, and to answer my own question, the problem is that all research in this field is geared towards the identification of materials or energy sources that can be commoditised.

Nanzikambe 12y ago
"Metallic vanadium is not found in nature, but vanadium compounds occur naturally in about 65 different minerals. Economically significant examples include patronite (VS4),[26] vanadinite (Pb5(VO4)3Cl), and carnotite (K2(UO2)2(VO4)2·3H2O). Much of the world's vanadium production is sourced from vanadium-bearing magnetite found in ultramafic gabbro bodies. Vanadium is mined mostly in South Africa, north-western China, and eastern Russia. In 2010 these three countries mined more than 98% of the 56,000 tonnes of produced vanadium.[27] Vanadium is also present in bauxite and in fossil fuel deposits such as crude oil, coal, oil shale and tar sands. In crude oil, concentrations up to 1200 ppm have been reported. When such oil products are burned, the traces of vanadium may initiate corrosion in motors and boilers.[28] An estimated 110,000 tonnes of vanadium per year are released into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels.[29] Vanadium has also been detected spectroscopically in light from the Sun and some other stars.[30]" "Vanadium metal is obtained via a multistep process that begins with the roasting of crushed ore with NaCl or Na2CO3 at about 850 °C to give sodium metavanadate (NaVO3). An aqueous extract of this solid is acidified to give "red cake", a polyvanadate salt, which is reduced with calcium metal. As an alternative for small-scale production, vanadium pentoxide is reduced with hydrogen or magnesium. Many other methods are also in use, in all of which vanadium is produced as a byproduct of other processes.[31] Purification of vanadium is possible by the crystal bar process developed by Anton Eduard van Arkel and Jan Hendrik de Boer in 1925. It involves the formation of the metal iodide, in this example vanadium(III) iodide, and the subsequent decomposition to yield pure metal.[32]" Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium#Occurrence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium#Occurrence So not only is extracting this stuff going to involve mining, the process of extraction itself relies on extremely toxic substances, and the most economic areas to mine it are places it's less than prudent to rely upon economically (China, Russia, South Africa)

planckscnst 12y ago

Knight describes the color changes as the vanadium is reduced - yellow -> green -> blue -> violet as the vanadium receives electrons from the zinc. But then later, he describes the battery. "In one tank, the vanadium releases electrons, turning from yellow to blue." At least one of these statements are incorrect.

avn2109 12y ago
>> "One of these statements are incorrect" One _or more_ are incorrect :)
- thomasvarney723 12y ago
  "At least one of these statements are incorrect."
mikexstudios 12y ago
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium#Compounds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium#Compounds The latter statement is incorrect, but it's an easy to make mistake. What he probably meant was that "in one tank, the vanadium releases electrons, turning from blue to yellow while in the other tank, vanadium accepts electrons, turning from yellow to blue."

giarc 12y ago

The article states that peak demand is the evening... I would have thought peak demand would have been during the day when large factories are operating at peak output.

jarvist 12y ago
Large industrial users don't vary their demand much, and actually change when they use it to fit the demand curves (i.e. Aluminium smelters). Peak in the UK is early evening, when people are still working late & also people returning home (electric trains), heating houses, dinner, doing laundry etc. http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/
- zhte415 12y ago
  This is an amazingly hands-on dashboard. Together with handy tips on why and when peaks and troughs occur. For example I had no idea UK wind potential (potential) capacity was so close to nuclear.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 12y ago
    Yep, and look at the graphs. Look at the yearly graph at the bottom, nuclear output averages 6.0 - 7.0GW, wind output averages about 2.0 - 2.5GW over a 12 month period, for about the same nameplate capacity (installed nameplate capacity: Wind 8GW; Nuclear 12GW - close enough to support the following argument). This means we have to overbuild wind capacity by a factor of about 3 to 4 in order to match nuclear / coal / gas. Now have a think about how much steel and concrete are required to build 1GW of wind base load capacity compared to 1GW base load nuclear. You need to build, say, 3x 640MW reactors to achieve 1GW continuous output, so 1 reactor can be offline for refuelling or maintenance at any one time, while the other two are run at 80% capacity. To achieve 1GW of base load wind you need to build 3 to 4GW nameplate capacity, and even then the wind doesn't blow all the time, so you need widely dispersed wind, plus storage because sometimes the wind doesn't blow anywhere in the UK for days on end - the currently weekly graph shows this: wind has been producing approximately 0GW output for most of the last week. Also, wind needs long new transmission lines, (large) nuclear can be a drop in replacement for existing coal plants as they are retired, or built next / close to existing transmission lines. There are plenty of resources on the web that will help you discover the materials inputs for different generating technologies, see bravenewlcimate.com particularly [1] for example. Regardless of what technology we choose moving forward, to achieve zero emissions by 2050 would require a war-like rollout, starting now. But wind and solar are at least a couple of magnitudes of order more materials-intensive than nuclear / coal / gas for the same base load output. And there probably aren't that many sites suitable for wind, especially ones that don't require 1000km new transmission lines. I'm not against renewables per se, I'm just for math. The idea of 'renewable resources' appeals to me. But until the math magically changes, I don't see how wind and solar (with or without storage) is a good idea, either environmentally from the materials-input perspective, or economically from the end-users perspective. What we need to push us forward technologically is large amounts of cheap / free zero emissions -when generating- electricity. Another strike against wind and solar is this: if either was so attractive economically then large investment funds would have flooded the market with the technology. But it isn't, which speaks directly about the ROI (Return on Investment), which is derived from materials input and running cost per dollar return. The only way it makes sense economically to build wind and solar is if the price of electricity goes up, which is ideal if you want people to freeze to death or die of heat stroke, or make your electric car uneconomical to run. I think that UK National Grid Status webpage is the best example of wind not working as a solution to electricity supply, unless you define the problem as "how to make expensive unreliable electricity" a la Germany and Denmark [2], who have the highest wind electricity generation in Europe and the most expensive electricity in Europe [3]. I may have waffled on more than I originally intended. 1. http://bravenewclimate.com/2009/10/18/tcase4/ http://bravenewclimate.com/2009/10/18/tcase4/ 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_European_Union http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_European_Unio... 3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_pricing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_pricing Edit: speeling nd grama

XorNot 12y ago

I've been hearing about these types of batteries for years (they were developed at UNSW where I attended) but the technology has been unviable ever since then. The problem, near as I can tell, is that even with the benefits, vanadium is still too expensive. It would cost ~$80,000 or more in conc. vanadium for storing 100 kwH - just enough energy to keep a house safely off the grid. To that price you have to add the solar system to charge it, the cell stack, the conc. H2SO4 you have to dissolve the vanadium in etc. We need to get way cheaper then that before we can get serious about this - ideally cheap enough that we can encourage everyone to have a cell stack in their house that offsets their peak loads. That would open up some real options.

stcredzero 12y ago
How about $100,000 per a couple dozen houses?

ender7 12y ago

I suppose it's my turn to link to another effort in this area, liquid salt batteries: http://www.ted.com/talks/donald_sadoway_the_missing_link_to_renewable_energy http://www.ted.com/talks/donald_sadoway_the_missing_link_to_... They have the advantage of being much cheaper to manufacture, but I don't know how their energy density stacks up.

afarrell 12y ago
http://www.ambri.com/ http://www.ambri.com/ is the company that is bringing this tech to production. Also, Donald Sadoway is a great teacher.
comboy 12y ago
I remember watching this tedtalk. Very nice. Is anything known about the progress they made since then?

inportb 12y ago

> ... peak demand for electricity, which generally comes in the late afternoon and evening, when everyone travels home, turns on the lights, heating or air conditioning, boils the kettle, bungs dinner in the microwave, and so on Related video: http://www.bbc.co.uk/britainfromabove/stories/people/teatimebritain.shtml http://www.bbc.co.uk/britainfromabove/stories/people/teatime...

callesgg 12y ago

You Will still lose some 20 + 20% due to charge and discharge inefficiencies. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium_redox_battery http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium_redox_battery

discreteevent 12y ago

From the article in reference to sea squirts that digest vanadium: "Having committed themselves to this life of tedium, they also digest their redundant brains" . --- There are times in life where being able to do this temporarily would certainly be a relief :)

johnzim 12y ago
I think that's what boozahol is for
EdwardCoffin 12y ago
This is the subject of a classic joke about tenure: “The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain anymore, so it eats it! It's rather like getting tenure.” http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/52415-the-juvenile-sea-squirt-wanders-through-the-sea-searching-for http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/52415-the-juvenile-sea-squir...

stephenmm 12y ago

While researching this I found a tremendous resource that goes in to pretty good depth of all the alternatives for grid level storage: http://www.sbc.slb.com/SBCInstitute/Publications/~/media/Files/SBC%20Energy%20Institute/SBC%20Energy%20Institute_Electricity_Storage%20Factbook_vf.ashx http://www.sbc.slb.com/SBCInstitute/Publications/~/media/Fil...

zvrba 12y ago

Interesting. Vanadium is relatively abundant too; Wikipedia places it on 20th place, ahead of more known and very widely used elements like chromium, nickel and zinc, copper and tin (on the 49th place!). This might be viable for mass-production.