The article is... light on details. Even with the wikipedia article [0] I'm having a hard time seeing how the pieces fit together. What's the interface between the air and the electrolyte, and the interface between the electrodes and the grid? It can't quite just be some wires connected to a bunch of FeO powder in a pool, right?
Also, it seems like in the charging process, they crack water to get back the H2 they consumed while discharging, and just throw off the oxygen. Because the discharge process involves using the Fe to crack water into H2 and O and immediately running the H2 through a fuel cell to get H2O again. I guess that's easier than just storing H2 and running it back and forth through a fuel cell? Am I just tired or is this wiki article written kind of badly?
Anyway, it sounds like the company in the OP is based on figuring out implementation details rather than brand new technology, which is kind of encouraging, as these things go.
In a hydrogen fuel cell, you have stored hydrogen. Whenever you want electricity, you combine it with oxygen to produce water. You can also drive the fuel cell in reverse, using an external source of electricity to convert water into hydrogen (which is stored)+oxygen.
In the iron-air cell, they are adding another layer of the process on top of the above, to avoid storing hydrogen.
To store power in the cell, you use electricity to break down water into hydrogen+oxygen. The hydrogen is then immediately reacted with FeO/rust to create Iron+water. These two are easy to store.
To get power from the cell, you allow the iron to combine with water, i.e iron+water=Rust+Hydrogen. The hydrogen is then immediately used in the fuel cell to produce electricity.
Thank you for your submission of proposed new revolutionary battery technology. Your new technology claims to be superior to existing lithium-ion technology and is just around the corner from taking over the world. Unfortunately your technology will likely fail, because:
[ ] it is impractical to manufacture at scale.
[ ] it will be too expensive for users.
[ ] it suffers from too few recharge cycles.
[ ] it is incapable of delivering current at sufficient levels.
[ ] it lacks thermal stability at low or high temperatures.
[ ] it lacks the energy density to make it sufficiently portable.
[ ] it has too short of a lifetime.
[ ] its charge rate is too slow.
[ ] its materials are too toxic.
[ ] it is too likely to catch fire or explode.
[ ] it is too minimal of a step forward for anybody to care.
[ ] this was already done 20 years ago and didn't work then.
[ ] by the time it ships li-ion advances will match it.
These long duration iron based "batteries" are often up against creating and storing hydrogen as a competitor rather than lithium or even sodium based batteries.
This one seems to directly involve Hydrogen production.
Cheaper standard batteries will definitely crimp its market, especially anywhere vaguely sunny, but growing markets for green hydrogen are more likely to kill it entirely.
Why store Hydrogen in a clunky way when it can be bought and sold directly.
Funny how the picture of the building is exactly like this one on LoopNet, the commercial realty site.[1] Except that the battery article clipped off the logo on top of the building, which isn't that of Ore Energy.
That article describes the architectural features of the “Matrix ONE” building in the Netherlands. Matrix ONE appears to be part of an “innovation hub” where firms research things like sustainable energy:
“Matrix ONE is the largest of seven buildings that now make up the Matrix Innovation Center, part of Amsterdam Science Park, where scientists and entrepreneurs work on sustainable solutions for current and future problems.” [0]
Seems reasonable to me that they would use a picture of the iconic building where their company works, much as a firm in New York’s World Trade Center might post that iconic silhouette without implying the whole thing is theirs.
It’s not fake, although I see how it could be taken to imply they’re bigger than they are. Even so it signals that this enterprise is somewhat more serious than a crank in his suburban garage, for whatever value that signal conveys…
This is very light on the details of their batteries, unfortunately.
Iron-air batteries have been known for awhile now, the challenge is making them commercially viable. If I recall, their efficiency is awful for one. There's a company called Form Energy in West Virginia that is supposedly nearly done with a factory to build them for grid storage.
>Southern Company subsidiary Georgia Power, meanwhile, plans to deploy a 15 MW/1,500 MWh Form Energy system as early as 2026, pending regulatory approval
And zero actual stuff about I made a trial one and hooked it to my roof solar and it works fine - they started in 2017 so you think they might have done that by now.
I hope it all works though. It would be good for green energy.
For each kilo of iron you would like to extract electricity from by oxidizing it using ordinary air, you will need to process about 1.85 kilos of air.
This is the amount of air that contains the 0.43 kilos of oxygen that will be needed to effect the oxidation reaction by combining with the iron.
This much air will have to be processed at a rate and in such a way that the oxygen contained in the air will be efficiently made available for the iron to react with, at the desired rate of energy generation expected from a given mass of iron.
On the positive side, air is pretty light so it might not seem to require as much heavy lifting as the iron content, on the negative side air is pretty thin and kilos of air take up lots of space.
If something like this were to be scaled to absurd enough sizes, you never know what could happen.
Unlike huge wind turbines which can end up knocking birds out of the sky, a massive operation to remove oxygen from the air might just suffocate them from a distance.
There would be just as many sparks as there would from any other battery capable of delivering the same amperage at the same voltage level.
Oxidation of a given mass of iron may occur over a wildly variable amount of time depending on conditions.
This is where the implementation comes in, the rate of oxygen absorption when discharging may or may not be a limiting factor, considering other things like the working nature of the electrolyte, and the physical structure of the metallic iron in contact with the electrolyte.
In general the more surface area of a metal electrode of given mass, the more current it will be able to deliver at one time.
Rusting does not have to be slow, a good demo is to machine or polish plain iron (not steel) to a clean smooth rust-free appearance where it's pure bare metal. Bottom of a cast iron skillet works. Under ambient conditions of temperature and humidity it can retain its mirror-like appearance for weeks or months, but eventually will get a brown coating of surface rust. Sooner if the humidity is higher, and much sooner if temperature fluctuations have caused any humidity to condense at times. Or you can put the freshly polished metal out in the sun for a few minutes to heat up, add a drop of water, let it sit level and watch it rust before your eyes.
And that's plain water, which is actually not an electrolyte, since electrolytes' major property is to conduct electricity, versus very pure water whose quality is measured by its lack of conductivity.
The drop of water on the iron surface is not exactly a common catalyst either even though it increases the rate of reaction between the iron and the oxygen in the air. Water there is mainly the solvent that makes it more possible.
In the article water is considered the "electrolyte" but I would say it's more like the main low-cost ingredient that turns into electrolyte once you start putting electrodes in the water, and naturally changes constituency as discharging and charging take place. On contact some iron ions will dissolve in the water[0] and it will start to become capable of conducting electricity before too long. Like any other battery not only the electrode structure but also the electrolyte must be robust enough to carry the entire amount of current expected to be delivered.
[0] This happens without any acid being intentionally added, but when working there needs to be a fairly high concentration of ions in the electrolyte to support high conductivity. Conventionally not only the metal ions but also acid or alkali ions in the electrolyte contribute together.
This podcast is for a later-stage competitor (Form Energy), but it explains a lot of the broad strokes around the size of the problem, and why iron-air is a good solution for multi-day grid-scale energy storage: https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/whats-your-problem/the-cutti...
Battery reporting is still painful huh? People still not learning how to report?
You need a table with at minimum: density, charge time, number of cycles, cost to produce, state of development (lab, factory prototype, production…). Bonus points for losses/efficiency/your special metric that you can win on.
Density matters even for stationary storage. Less, but you can’t just omit it. Like you can’t omit it for gravity batteries which have an energy density comparable to that of raw lemons.
I think this holds for reporting on any field where you have expertise or deep knowledge. I read the news and just end up frustrated that something happened, and I don’t have the key details.
I don’t actually have that domain knowledge in case of batteries. Yet, without that info, every week for the past one or two decades some company or research team promises a battery breakthrough. None of them manage to mass produce.
In this field if you can’t spell the basic stats you are basically hiding that you don’t yet have a product.
I would expect "basic cell voltage" too, I find it super weird that is almost always omitted. I get that heavy-duty (they're shipping container-sized based on the renderings in the annoyingly designed scroll-to-change-everything page) batteries will probably contain multiple cells, but what is the basic bare voltage of the chemistry? Please.
Seriously though, cheap components (CPU is made of silicon, hard to find something cheaper, and growing silicon crystals are hard enough by itself) is just first step to cheap final product. There are way too much other stuff to do, like ability to repurpose existing production lines (vs cost of building totally new ones)
> In Europe, up to 60 per cent of renewable energy capacity goes unused on sunny and windy days. This results in the reliance on fossil-based energy resources such as coal or gas to meet electricity demands when renewable sources are unavailable.
I am really curious as to what hides behind this number. Afaik solar and wind aren't dispachable. You cannot just tell your solar panel or wind farm to stop producing energy if you have too much.
So if 60% of the capacity goes unused, it must be dispatchable hydraulic, in which case, isn't that kind of a good thing?
> You cannot just tell your solar panel or wind farm to stop producing energy if you have too much
You absolutely can, this is called "curtailment". The turbine is disconnected from the generator and the generator from the grid, while the blades can be turned to not generate lift ("feathering"). Meanwhile in a solar panel the electron-hole pairs made at the junction just harmlessly recombine.
The issue is that often the subsidy payment structure is set up such that, if the renewables are curtailed, they still have to be paid for.
See "California duck curve": using batteries to bridge mid-day energy into the evening.
Wind energy is dispatchable. "Redispatch". Around here the wind turbines are turned off all the time when there's too much energy. The wind farm operators are compensated for that.
Solar is not as trivial which is why batteries and other storage mechanisms are important.
Or Power to X things where power can be dumped if needed.
Huh? Solar panels can certainly be ‘turned off when there’s too much energy’ generation. In fact that’s their default state, they don’t generate any power until you pull current from them. They just sit there with a voltage difference across them.
Yes, that is true. I should have been more clear, sorry.
At least in Germany most private solar systems cannot be remote controlled yet so it's harder to actively steer the generation.
That is different with wind turbines.
Any source can be disconnected from the bulk electric system. If there is too much power and a generator is told to disconnect it is called a curtailment. Some contracts allow the generator to get paid for the power they could have produced but weren’t allowed to deliver due to too much supply / not enough load, so it isn’t really a good thing as the ratepayers still end up paying for the power not generated.
Dispatchable generally means you can tell the source when to generate as opposed to when not to.
Iron-air batteries are not for applications that require energy/mass density, like laptops and electric vehicles. They’re for fixed infrastructure like grid-scale batteries, where energy/$ is the relevant function. It needs to be almost literally as cheap as dirt.
They seem very focused on grid applications, yes. Beyond their key claim of a 10x cost advantage over lithium, it seems like they're only claiming the batteries will hold a charge for around a hundred hours: not at all good for long-term storage or devices, but perfectly reasonable for the grid.
Meaning background discharge is quite high, impacting efficiency. Good enough to smooth daily peaks though
Also, 10x cheaper than pricy
li-ion might not be enough, there are lots of other [weird] solutions, like pumping water up. Better question - how many cycles will battery last? This impacts price a lot
Shuttling water around, though, depends on having a bucket big enough and high enough to put enough water into to matter. A big ol’ bucket of rust might be easier to site if you don’t have a dam or a hillside reservoir handy.
I think this was just poor wording in the article. My local power company (Dominion Energy VA) recently started a huge iron-air battery project because the technology supports 100 hours of active discharge [0]. I'm sure there's some background discharge, but it takes a lot longer than 100 hours for iron to naturally rust through.
Is there any kind of grid-scale seasonal storage technology on the horizon? Batteries seem right out from the gate unless the cost drops to 1/10 of current. The only practical one I see is synthesizing a fuel (methane, hydrogen, whatever) which can be stored ~forever.
This isn’t exactly what you are asking for, but in terms of seasonal storage, the ground is at least commonly used in district heating and cooling systems via borefields as essentially a thermal battery. Buildings reject heating into the loop during summer, and it then gets dumped into the ground at the bore field, and similarly, in winter the pull heat from the loop which comes from the bore field. Ultimately, this relies on the fact that the borefield is already essentially at the right temperature to start (which is pretty trivial to achieve at a depth of around say 200m). One caveat is that if you live in a heating-dominated climate (so cold and snowy), you need to inject heat into the ground so that that the net balance of the thermal demand on the year is unbiased. However, you could see a version of this where you actually just overcool your buildings in summertime when you have excess solar potential, and then pull that heat back out in winter and end up balanced. This strategy wouldn’t work in a cooling-dominated climate unless you have excess clean electricity in winter but not summer.
From the perspective of the grid, this would effectively be a form of seasonal storage, since you no longer need to spend any electricity to inject heat into your borefield for balancing purposes, and additionally, you would have lower DeltaTs in winter than you would otherwise so your heat exchanger efficiencies ought to improve.
Edit: It’s almost certainly a better idea to use proper batteries that operate on the timescale of a day to soak up the excess electricity during the day and reuse it during the evening peak, rather than use the excess to pump heat into the ground, but still, there might be at least something there if there is a need for truly seasonal storage…
Maybe I will try to run some sims of this kind of system sometime over the summer.
Assuming you can just store it as piles of iron dust (somehow shielded from air/oxygen) and assuming a gross density of 5 t/m³ for iron dust you'd get a volumetric energy density in the ballpark of 10,000 kWh/m³.
Deregulate nuclear especially small scale reactors utilizing known technologies that make them incapable of melting down. Why engage in the insane mental gymnastics to set up some Rube-Goldberg machine of centralized wind and solar with battery backup. The costs are incredibly distorted for wind, solar and nuclear - with the latter being artificially expensive due to regulation and misinformed sentiment and the former being artificially inexpensive due to costs being hidden in the lifecycle, supply chain, and problems only seen at very large scale.
Also, it seems like in the charging process, they crack water to get back the H2 they consumed while discharging, and just throw off the oxygen. Because the discharge process involves using the Fe to crack water into H2 and O and immediately running the H2 through a fuel cell to get H2O again. I guess that's easier than just storing H2 and running it back and forth through a fuel cell? Am I just tired or is this wiki article written kind of badly?
Anyway, it sounds like the company in the OP is based on figuring out implementation details rather than brand new technology, which is kind of encouraging, as these things go.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal%E2%80%93air_electrochemi...