How The Battery Revolution Will Power Our Future

 U.S. President Joe Biden has made batteries a critical component of his carbon-neutral strategy. He insists on American production of modern batteries rather than relying on imports from China. Chinese companies, including Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Limited (CATL), BYD Auto, and Hefei Guoxuan High-Tech produce 79 percent of the world's batteries. American manufacturers make only seven percent. 

According to innovator Elon Musk, batteries are the key to our future. Their development led to the technical revolution that brought smartphones, tablets, and electric vehicles to the world. Therefore, it is surprising that the science behind the lithium-ion batteries driving the modern world has remained essentially unchanged for more than three decades. 

The prototypes of lithium-ion batteries appeared in the 1980s. Then the physicist John Goodenough suggested using lithium cobaltite in batteries. In 2019, he received the Nobel Prize for his idea. 

A BloombergNEF study found that the average price of lithium-ion batteries fell from $688 to $137 per kilowatt-hour between 2013 and 2020. They predict that by 2023 prices will be close to $100 per kWh. The average price of batteries for electric vehicles (EV) was $126 per kWh. Thus, the cost of the battery pack in the total vehicle price dropped to 21 percent. By 2030, due to new technological advances, the cost of batteries can drop to $58 per kWh. 

However, lithium-ion batteries have serious disadvantages. Among them are a high fire hazard, sensitivity to temperature differences, self-discharge, and aging. Many still remember the story of the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 series smartphones that suddenly caught fire. It is this property that prompted airlines to require the carriage of lithium-ion batteries exclusively in carry-on baggage. Another liability is that lithium-ion batteries used in electric vehicles contain hundreds of kilograms of metals and materials such as graphite, cobalt, and high-purity nickel. When mined and processed, it can cause significant pollution and increase carbon dioxide emissions. 

For example, an average battery of a light EV requires about 20 kg of nickel and up to 20 kg of cobalt in the cathode. Of the metals used, nickel is critical as it helps the batteries store more energy and reduces the need for the more expensive cobalt. Tesla accounted for more than half of all nickel used in the European electric vehicle industry last year, and Musk selects its supply as a concern. Tesla plans to produce three terawatt-hour batteries by 2030, which will deplete most of the world's nickel production at current levels. 

According to Fastmarkets, cobalt prices, as the world's most expensive metal, rose to $42 per kg in March 2021. Analysts predict that by the end of 2021, they will reach $57, and in 2024 they will reach $80. The primary deposits of cobalt are located in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. 

Therefore, it is not surprising that companies are actively developing new types of batteries. For example, General Motors (GM) has partnered with SolidEnergy Systems to manufacture Ultium batteries for its electric vehicles. These will include a liquid electrolyte, graphite-based anodes, and cathodes with a mix of nickel, cobalt, manganese, and aluminum. As a result, the price of batteries will drop by 50-60 percent, and their weight will decrease. As a result, GM expects to reduce the cost of storing 1 kWh of electricity from $150 to $100 by 2025. 

More and more electric vehicles in China use alternative lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries. They are cheaper and less toxic but have a lower capacity. Such batteries are developed by Tesla Model 3, the Chinese automaker BYD, and Volkswagen. But so far, LFP batteries account for only 14 percent of the market, and by 2030 this figure will be from 15 to 20 percent. 

Tesla and Volkswagen are also promising to cut cobalt use in the coming years. Last year Elon Musk held a special online presentation called Tesla Battery Day. He announced that Tesla would begin mass production of a new generation of batteries that will be much more powerful and durable than the current ones within three years and cost half the $25,000. Tesla's new 4680 battery pack will be six times more potent than its predecessors and five times more energy-efficient. Moreover, its size will be only 46x80 mm.

Lithium-ion batteries' severe flaws and shortcomings make it understandable for the excitation around radically new ways to develop solid-state batteries. The technology will use solid electrodes and a solid electrolyte instead of the liquid or polymer gel electrolytes found in lithium-ion batteries. Radically new technology promises to address many of these environmental and safety concerns. 

In addition, this innovative generation power supply will store energy at a much higher density. Electrolytes also serve as a battery separator, a vital component of a lithium-ion battery, reducing the risk of fire and the number of raw materials needed. 

The pursuit of shorter charging times and longer mileage without increasing the cost of battery packs and the risk of fire are the most striking improvement trends in modern batteries. Removing these limitations is key to making the battery revolution genuinely irreversible. 

 

There is something to be said about the different kind of energy storage - thermal energy storage, particularly those using phase-change materials (PCM).  They don't suffer practically any of the problems which plaque electrical batteries - they are completely fire-safe (the most of their content is water), the number of charge-discharge cycles is unlimited, and the depth of discharge does not affect their efficiency. It makes them a perfect addition to the solar thermal systems (STS) which also do not use rare metals and therefore not subject of the same supply bottleneck that PV and computer chips are.

 

Autonomous Mobile Energy System (AMES) developed by Ascent Systems Technologies implements an optimal combination of both PV-battery and STC-PCM. All controlled by a smart control system using machine learning software. It works as a self-charging energy storage and provides uninterrupted source of clean energy with no fuel or connection to the power grid.

 

The Era of Energy Mobility

It used to be when we did not have to move stuff in order to get energy for our needs.

Then came the industrial revolution. We discovered efficiency and convenience of steam engines and factory machines. Since then we started making energy further and further from where we need it. We erected dams on rivers far from cities, we dug and drilled the earth for something we could burn for energy - coal or oil. And we started moving huge amounts of stuff (through pipelines, with tankers, over power lines etc.) in order to get energy where we need it, spending energy to do so, and losing a big portion of it along the way. If you were asked to design the energy process from the scratch, would you choose a complicated system involving getting raw fuel (oil, coal) in one part of the planet, bringing it to the place we can process it to usable form (refined fuel), then move it again huge distances so it could be burned to generate energy? And then we need to transmit that energy (in electricity form) long distances again to the places where we use it. Permanent renewable sources - solar plants and wind farms - cut some steps but can't avoid other - we still need to move energy from the producer to the consumer, with the same losses, plus added complexity of the grid control and security.

What do you do if the grid is down or pipeline jeopardized? What if you need energy in a different place, especially where there is no grid - do you want to pull the power lines with you? We live in a wireless world - why do we still rely on steel and copper to deliver energy? You may ask: do we have a choice? Yes we do.

Autonomous Mobile Energy System (#AMES) is such a choice. It can be delivered to any location in the world and provide an uninterrupted source of clean energy on demand, then moved to another place if needed. 

Dr. Paul Jaffe from the US Naval Research Lab (NRL) says that today, a confluence of advances at NRL and elsewhere presents an unprecedented opportunity to develop two potentially revolutionary energy technologies: power beaming and space-based solar. Delivering energy without moving or employing mass and the prospect of collecting clean, continuous, abundant sunlight in space and distributing it globally present compelling capabilities for remote installation energy resupply, disaster response and many other applications. #AMES module is an ideal platform to build upon the ground segment of such space-based solar power system.

Modular architecture of the #AMES module makes it flexible allowing them when deployed over the remote area to be used as temporary cell towers, or nodes of the ground network for the internet-over-the-satellite system, such as Starlink, being currently deployed by SpaceX. 

In the mean time, if there is a source of waste heat, such as waste processing or a commercial operation, #AMES can serve as a thermal energy battery able to store excess energy and then use it for heating spaces or other purposes. 

Microsoft is experimenting with the underwater data server for the purpose of autonomy and efficient cooling. It is designed in the form of a cylinder of the size fitting the standard shipping container. Thus, Microsoft is convinced, it could be deployed to remote places like islands, or disaster areas to support relief efforts. Why not in the remote Northern areas with their natural cooling? Incorporated in the #AMES module, they could sink all of the waste heat into the onboard thermal energy storage to be then directed for heating and other useful purposes.

It's time to move away from moving energy around - we can get energy where and when we need it!

What's the Worst That Could Happen?

    On September 2nd 1859 C.F. Herbert, prospecting for gold in south-eastern Australia, saw something sublime in the evening sky. “A scene of almost unspeakable beauty presented itself, lights of every imaginable colour were issuing from the southern heavens,” he would later recall. “The rationalist and pantheist saw nature in her most exquisite robes. The superstitious and the fanatical had dire forebodings, and thought it a foreshadowing of Armageddon and final dissolution".

    Those who saw cataclysm  in the auroral display were not exactly wrong: just ahead of their time. The Carrington event, as the geomagnetic storm Herbert observed came to be known, was the result of 100 megatonnes of charged particles thrown off by the Sun a few hours earlier slamming into Earth's magnetosphere, a protective magnetic sheath generated by currents in the planet's liquid core. The electromagnetic effects of the onslaught did not just produce  a truly spectacular display of the Southern Lights (and the Northern ones, too, visible as far south as Colombia). They induced powerful currents in any electrical conductors to hand. Some telegraph networks took on a life of their own!..

    Such effects mattered little at the time light bulb was 20 years inn the future. In today's ubiquitously, fundamentally and increasingly electrified world a "coronal mass ejection" (CME) as large as that of the Carrington event could cause all kinds of chaos. Induced currents would topple electrical grids. Satellites would have their circuitry fried and possibly be dragged by the outer atmosphere bloated by the storm's energy. A slight foretaste of what might come we had in 1989 when Quebec's grid was knocked out by a storm many hundreds times less in severity than the Carrington event.

    When the next big one comes is hard to predict but that it will eventually come is beyond the debate. Solar physicists put the odds of a Carrington level geomagnetic storm some time in the next ten years at around one in ten (!) 

    The most devastating effect of a really large CME would be on the transformers in electrical grids: gigantic, purpose-built machines that step voltage down between the long-range transmission grid and the distribution grid which runs lower-voltage power into homes, businesses and hospitals. Strong enough induced currents will damage those transformers beyond repair. Because it typically takes between six and 12 months to get a replacement transformer made - and only a few countries have the industrial capacity to make them - that could have many grids crippled for a long time. "If you simultaneously lose the ability to pump water, to pump fuel, to communicate and lose eyes in the sky, yu pretty quickly get into territory that's never really been explored before", says Dan Baker, the director of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

    Geomagnetic storms, as devastating as they could be. are only a subset of all events found in the historical and geological record that present plausible threat s of catastrophe. Giant volcanic eruptions, powerful earthquakes, tsunamis and really strong hurricanes are just some examples of others. Frequency and magnitude of disastrous events shows a tendency to increase.

   

                        Credit: Swiss Re/Cat Perils and Swiss Re Institute   

Everything in our modern world relies on energy, mostly electricity. Just because we came to depend heavily, or rather critically, on the power grids providing energy, any of such events would leave many thousands, potentially millions, of people without energy, water, food and communication for extended period of time, leading to many lives lost and causing huge economic damage. Does it have to be that way? Can it be done differently? Yes, with distributed energy generation.

Clean energy can be produced where is needed, without the need to transmit it across countries and continents. This would minimize the footprint, eliminate huge inefficiencies, dramatically increase reliability and avoid a domino effect of failing power grids.

Moreover, the energy generation and storage system does not have to be permanently attached to one location. Meet the Autonomous Mobile Energy System (AMES) developed by Ascent Systems Technologies.

AMES is a self-contained module that fits into a standard shipping container and can be delivered on demand to any geographical location in the world. Rapidly deployed, it provides an uninterrupted source of clean energy without requiring any fuel supply or connection to the power grid. AMES combines several advanced technologies in one integrated and seamlessly operating system. The brain of the module is Ascent's proprietary configuration and adaptive control software combining model-predictive approach with a novel machine learning technique.

The module will be invaluable in situations such as disaster relief efforts and humanitarian missions. It can also serve remote communities, mining operations, research stations, field hospitals and many other applications providing critical energy security while protecting the environment. Multiple modules deployed in the area or even at different geographical locations are connected via smart network for environment monitoring and continuous performance optimization. Welcome to the future of energy!