There are two kinds of storage needed for a 100% renewable grid. The first is for the afternoon and morning peaks. The second is long-duration storage for several days when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine. Lithium-ion batteries are fine for a few hours of storage, but they become too expensive for long-term storage.
A US company has just announced details of its iron-air battery, which will provide power for up to 4 days at 1/10th the cost of a lithium-ion battery with much greater energy density.
From Energy-Storage News:
Startup Form Energy has finally made public the battery chemistry behind a technology that the company claims could make challenges of integrating renewable energy a thing of the past and outcompete fossil fuels.
Promising that it will make possible the cost-effective “multi-day” storage of energy, the disclosure has been eagerly awaited at least since Form Energy penned a contract to deploy a pilot 1MW system with Minnesota utility company Great River Energy in May 2020.
Such a technology could make it very easy to store the variable output of solar and wind generators and use the energy as and when it is needed, practically making the use of fossil fuels obsolete. However the company has been keeping its technology under wraps until yesterday, when it also announced that is has underway a US$200 million Series D funding round, led by a US$25 million investment from steel and mining company ArcelorMittal.
“There is an overwhelming support for clean energy. The reduction in renewable energy costs has added to its growing appeal; new onshore wind and utility-scale solar are now cheaper than conventional energy sources,” Form Energy CEO Mateo Jaramillo told Energy-Storage.news yesterday.
“If we want to truly reach a clean energy future, we must have solutions in place to store low-cost but intermittent renewable energy over multiple days.”
In an April 2021 interview for the site, Jaramillo had been keen to talk about the company and its aims, but made clear the battery chemistry would not be discussed or revealed at that time.
It has now been disclosed that the company’s first commercial product is an iron-air chemistry battery. It can store and dispatch energy for up to 100 hours at a cost which is competitive with existing thermal power plants, and could be up to 10 times cheaper than lithium-ion, Form Energy claimed. The goal will be building large-scale multi-megawatt front-of-meter energy storage facilities, with equipment manufactured close to where the systems will be sited and using iron that can also be locally sourced.
According to a fact sheet supplied by the company, the basic principle is based around reversible oxidation (rusting) of iron. As the battery discharges, oxygen from the air turns metallic iron into rust. Then as it is charged, the rust is converted back into iron through the application of electrical current. The only thing emitted by this process is oxygen.
“It’s modular, safe, and can be sited anywhere in the grid. Our technology differs from other energy storage technologies in that it has a very low-cost of stored energy,” Jaramillo said.
He added that while the technology aims to store energy at a much, much lower cost than lithium-ion, the rechargeable iron-air battery is expected to be a complementary technology to lithium, rather than its competitor. Together, lithium and iron-air can create “low-cost, highly reliable renewable power plants and complete systems,” he claimed.
“Our technology is not a replacement for lithium-ion. Quite the opposite, in fact.”
Just Have A Think has made an excellent video giving far more details of the process.
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