GM’s New Plans To Challenge Tesla’s Electric Battery Dominance

Climate Progress has an article on GMs continuing interest in electric vehicles - GM’s New Plans To Challenge Tesla’s Electric Battery Dominance.

General Motors plans to challenge Tesla’s share of the electric vehicle innovation marketplace by doing two things: making a better battery, and putting it in a long-range electric car that’s affordable.

GM announced this week that it’s developing a car that can go 200 miles on a single charge — the same distance that Tesla’s Model S can. But the GM version will cost about $30,000, less than half the $71,000 sticker price of the Model S.

The company is also aiming to do an overhaul of the electric car battery. As Quartz explains, Tesla’s Model S uses Panasonic batteries made of nickel, cobalt and aluminum. GM wants to use a lithium-ion battery made of nickel, cobalt and manganese — a chemical mix that scientists think could create a cheaper and more powerful lithium-ion battery, but that right now has some flaws that GM hopes can be fixed.

Right now, GM sells two battery-powered cars: the Chevy Volt, a plug-in hybrid which costs $35,000 and can go 38 miles on a charge before its gas-powered generator takes over, and the Chevy Spark, an all-electric car that can go 82 miles on a charge and costs $26,685 (both costs are before the $7,500 tax credit that electric car buyers are eligible for in the U.S.). GM is also focusing on making its current cars cheaper — the company has said the next generation of the Volt will cost $7,000 to $10,000 less than the current version.

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Zinc Battery Seen as Way to Cut Heat Related Power Losses

The heatwave in the northeast US seems to be setting new records for power consumption - the NYT has an article on interest in increasing energy storage capacity to help make the grid more reliable - Battery Seen as Way to Cut Heat-Related Power Losses.

As scorching weather envelops the Northeast and the Midwest, electric utilities are scrambling to keep the power on while air-conditioners strain utilities’ capacity. By Tuesday afternoon in New York City and Westchester County, for instance, Consolidated Edison had logged nearly 7,700 interruptions since the heat arrived on Sunday, and it had dispatched crews to restore almost all of the power.

Such disruptions have plagued utilities for years: how do they keep extra electricity on hand and ready to go, avoiding the need to cut the voltage in stressed neighborhoods and lowering the risk of blackouts?

Now, several utilities, including Con Edison, National Grid and the large European utilities Enel and GDF SUEZ, have signed up to fine-tune and test what they hope could lead to an answer — a battery half the size of a refrigerator from Eos Energy Storage, the company said Tuesday. If the testing goes well, the batteries hold the promise of providing storage that until now has been unaffordable on a large scale. “Energy storage is no longer an idea and a theory — it’s actually a practical reality,” said Steve Hellman, Eos’s president. “You’re seeing a lot of commercial activity in the energy storage sector.”

Part of the appeal is economic: utilities could buy power from centralized plants during off-peak hours, when it is cheaper, and use it to feed the grid at peak hours when it is typically more expensive. That could also relieve congestion on some transmission lines, reducing strain and the need to spend money upgrading or repairing them. In addition, batteries could help integrate more renewable sources like solar and wind into the power grid, smoothing out their intermittent production.

“Energy storage in general has been kind of a holy grail for utilities — a lot of the generation and demand is instantaneous,” said Joseph Carbonara, project manager in research and development at Con Edison, who is managing the Eos program. “The utilities have always been looking to buffer that.”

Utilities and institutions across the country, many with grants from federal or state energy departments, are testing energy storage technologies. Con Edison and the City University of New York are using a different zinc-based battery from Urban Electric Power to help reduce the school’s peak energy use as part of a New York State Energy Research and Development Authority program. In California, Pacific Gas and Electric is studying sodium-sulfur batteries that can store more than six hours of energy. And Duke Energy is working with lead acid batteries from Xtreme Power that are linked to a wind farm in Texas.

At the same time, there are a host of start-ups racing to develop different technologies for a wide range of applications, and already there are some large-scale batteries tied to the grid. But the technology has generally proved too expensive for widespread adoption.

Eos says it has gotten around that problem. Its battery relies on zinc, a relatively plentiful and cheap element. The company projects that its cost will be $160 a kilowatt-hour, and that it would provide electricity cheaper than a new gas power plant built to help fulfill periods of high demand, Eos executives said. Other battery technologies can range from $400 to about $1,000 a kilowatt-hour.

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The battery storage system that could close down coal power

ReNew Economy has an article on a German energy storage technology company - The battery storage system that could close down coal power.

You don’t have to go far inside the headquarters of German battery storage company Younicos, or even their website for that matter, to find out what they are about. “Let the fossils rest in peace,” the logo suggests. Another sign at their technology centre east of Berlin proclaims: “You are now leaving the CO2 producing sector of the world.”

This sign is designed to mimic those which adorned the checkpoints that separated the various sectors of east and west Berlin before the wall was torn down. Younicos believe they have a technology that is equally disruptive, and can break down one of the last barriers to 100 per cent renewable energy: the need to run fossil fuel generation to control the “frequency” of the grid, and the other system services such as voltage control.

The company, based in Berlin Adlershof, on the eastern outskirts of the capital, is developing 10MW-sized battery parks, using battery systems that it says can stabilise the grid faster, cheaper and with greater precision that conventional generation.

It says that these systems can substitute 10 times the capacity from conventional generation – coal, nuclear and gas – and at a fraction of the cost. According to Younicos spokesman Philip Hiersemenzel, each battery park can be installed at around € 15 million, which means that for an investment of €3 billion, conventional generation in Germany’s 80GW would no longer be needed – at least for frequency and stability purposes.

This is critical is Germany. The sheer scale of their solar PV installations – it has more than 35GW – means that on some days it already produces more than half the country’s electricity needs. But baseload generators have to keep running for the sake of frequency control and system stability, this has caused spot prices to plunge well below zero.

For an 80GW grid, it needs about 20GW and 25GW of “must run” balancing to maintain frequency and keep the grid stable. Younicos says 2GW of its battery parks would render this need redundant. Around 200 of it battery parks could be installed around the country at a total cost of around €3 billion.

(Of course, that is not the only impediment to 100 per cent renewables – enough solar and wind power needs to be built, and other storage is needed, battery storage to respond to variations in load on a minute by minute and hour by hour basis, and longer-term or “seasonal” storage, which can take excess production and store it – synthetic diesel, hydrogen etc.).

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Battery Storage Could Get a Huge Boost from Seaweed

Technology Review has an article on a possible technique for greatly improving the performance of lithium-ion batteries - Battery Storage Could Get a Huge Boost from Seaweed

Lithium-ion batteries could hold up to 10 times as much energy per cell if silicon anodes were used instead of graphite ones. But manufacturers dont use silicon because such anodes degrade quickly as the battery is charged and discharged.

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Clemson University think they might have found the ingredient that will make silicon anodes work—a common binding agent and food additive derived from algae and used in many household products. They say this material could not only make lithium-ion batteries more efficient, but also cleaner and cheaper to manufacture.
Lithium-ion batteries store energy by accumulating ions at the anode; during use, these ions migrate, via an electrolyte, to the cathode. The anodes are typically made by mixing an electroactive graphite powder with a polymer binder—typically polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF)—dissolved in a solvent called NMP. The resulting slurry is spread on the metal foil used to collect electrical current, and dried.

If silicon particles are used as the basis of the electroactive powder, the batterys anode can hold more ions. But silicon particles swell as the battery is charged, increasing in volume up to four times their original size. This swelling causes cracks in the PVDF binder, damaging the anode. In research published today by Science, the Georgia Tech and Clemson scientists show that when alginate is used instead of PVDF, the anode can swell and the binder wont crack. This allows researchers to create a stable silicon anode that has, so far, been demonstrated to have eight times the capacity of the best graphite-based

The polymer alginate is made from brown algae, including the type which forms forests of giant kelp. It is already widely used as a gelling agent and a food additive. Initially, the researchers thought to replace PVDF with a combination of several different materials. Then, on theoretical grounds, they realized that a polymer with just the right kind of uniform structure could do all the things the binder was supposed to do, including providing good structural support while not chemically reacting with the electrolyte.

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