Battery Metals

Another big grid-scale storage battery will be installed in South Australia’s mid-north in the same region as the Tesla and Neoen big battery at Jamestown.

Tilt Renewables will connect a solar and battery system to its existing wind farm near Snowtown.

It also plans to put a pumped-hydro storage project in a disused quarry at Highbury in Adelaide’s north-east.

What are the plans?

The pumped hydro venture — 300 MW/1350 MWh — would be able to store enough power to exceed the output of the South Australian Government’s temporary diesel-fired Adelaide power plant for up to 4.5 hours.

At Snowtown, a 44 MW solar farm and 21 MW/26 MWh battery would be financially supported by South Australian taxpayers, through a $7.1 million grant from the state renewable technology fund.

How will it compare to the Tesla battery?

The proposed battery will be about one-fifth as powerful and will have one-fifth of the storage of the Tesla and Neoen one, which is already feeding into the electricity grid.

There is also a 30 MW battery due to start operating within months aimed at improving security of power supply on Yorke Peninsula.

In the state’s Riverland, the Lyon Group is involved in another solar farm and battery storage venture.

Will it reduce electricity bills?

Development approvals are still needed for the Tilt ventures, but South Australian Energy Minister Tom Koutsantonis said they would help drive down power prices.

“More renewable energy means cheaper power for South Australians,” he said.

“This planned new solar and battery farm in the mid-north and pumped hydro power plant in Highbury will add a huge amount of additional competition to our system.”

Tilt Renewables chief executive Deion Campbell said the additional infrastructure at Snowtown would create the biggest co-located wind, solar and battery facility in Australia.

He said the evening peak in wind force and daytime peak for solar would combine to help meet electricity demand and both Tilt proposals would lead to less power price volatility.

“Storage has always been a key component of an electricity system and pumped hydro allows renewable electricity to be stored and used when required, without introducing carbon into the equation,” he said.

Fallout from the Tesla virtual power plant idea continues

Meanwhile, an Australian energy company has hit out at the South Australian government over its plan to launch the world’s largest virtual power plant that will see at least 50,000 homes in South Australian given solar panels and batteries.

ShineHub — a Sydney based company — claims it was the first to come up with a similar idea and that it launched an almost identical concept last year in South Australia.

“I think it’s great that South Australia is moving in this direction, it’s definitely what the market needs,” co-founder of ShineHub Jin Kim told the ABC.

“However it was a little bit disappointing to see that the South Australian government did not make this roll-out available — or as an open tendering process for many of the Australian companies, not just ourselves — that could also deliver the exact same service or program.

“We really do hope that the South Australia government will consider a lot more Australian companies for the future plans because there are so many fantastic companies out there.”

Elon Musk is ‘Iron Man’

Mr Kim acknowledged the mastermind behind Tesla, Elon Musk, was leading the way in renewable energy.

But he hoped other smaller, local companies would get the opportunity to work on large-scale project in the years ahead.

“Elon Musk, when we talk about superheros, he is Iron Man, you know he has done such great things for the market itself,” he said.

“They are a fantastic but they are also an international company, for me I am not the Iron Man of renewable energy in Australia… but we really had a focus of how do we get an Australian company to achieve greater heights and help the Australian communities at the same time.”

Government defends approach to project

The Energy Minister, Tom Koutsantonis, argues that all businesses had an opportunity to pitch projects to the government.

“We launched a $150m Renewable Technology Fund and invited all renewables companies to pitch projects into that would benefit SA customers, grow our renewables industry and speed up tech development,” he said.

“That was a competitive, independent process and this project was one of the successful applicants, along with many others, including SA companies.”

Mr Koutsantonis said Tesla was not manufacturing the solar panels, but supplying the batteries for the project.

“In fact, the contract with Tesla includes a requirement that where possible the solar panels to be manufactured locally. This project alone will create 500 direct and indirect jobs in SA,” he said.

Scientists at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, have created a customizable, fabric-like power source that can be cut, folded or stretched without losing its function. Their findings are reported in Advanced Materials.

Wearable electronics need to be flexible and capable of retaining their function even under high deformation stress. Ideally, they should also have flexible batteries that can store charge for prolonged periods of time and are repeatedly rechargeable.

In this study, a research group led by Professor Chen Xiaodong, Associate Chair (Faculty) at the School of Materials Science & Engineering at NTU, has developed a customizable supercapacitor that fulfils all the above requirements.

Their invention is made of strengthened manganese dioxide nanowire composite material. While manganese dioxide is a common material for supercapacitors, the ultralong nanowire structure, strengthened with a network of carbon nanotubes and nanocellulose fibers, allows the electrodes to withstand the associated strains during the customization process.

When fabricated as a honeycomb-like structure, the supercapacitor had the ability to store an electrical charge four times higher than most existing stretchable supercapacitors. In addition, when stretched to four times its original length, it maintained nearly 98 percent of the initial ability to store electrical energy, even after 10,000 stretch-and-release cycles.

The researchers also showed that when the customizable supercapacitor was paired with a sensor and placed on the human elbow, it performed better than existing stretchable supercapacitors. Their supercapacitor was able to provide a stable stream of signals even when the arm was swinging. These signals were then transmitted wirelessly to external devices, such as one that captures a patient’s heart rate.

The authors believe that the editable supercapacitor could be easily mass-produced as it would rely on existing manufacturing technologies. Production cost will thus be low, estimated at about SGD$0.13 (USD$0.10) to produce 1 cm2 of the material.

“A reliable and editable supercapacitor is important for the development of the wearable electronics industry. It also opens up all sorts of possibilities in the realm of the ‘Internet-of-Things’ when wearable electronics can reliably power themselves and connect and communicate with appliances in the home and other environments,” said Chen.

“My own dream is to one day combine our flexible supercapacitors with wearable sensors for health and sports performance diagnostics. With the ability for wearable electronics to power themselves, you could imagine the day when we create a device that could be used to monitor a marathon runner during a race with great sensitivity, detecting signals from both under and over-exertion,” he added.

Hong Kong was set to be a global leader for electric vehicles, but Tesla may pull out if policies don’t change.

We hear continued talk about China being the biggest automotive market in the world and the “place to be” when it comes to electric car manufacturers. However, as we previously reported, there are many issues making it difficult for electric vehicle makers to succeed in the region.

Last year, Hong Kong removed full registration tax incentives for EVs, which forced prices to skyrocket as much as 80 percent. There’s also a cap involved that allows for only so much support for electric car buyers. Both are impacting companies like Tesla significantly and EV sales have tanked as a result.

The very first month after the incentives were eliminated (April 2017), not a single new EV was registered in Hong Kong. For the rest of the year, Hong Kong saw only 99 new registrations, compared to the 2,078 from the same time period in 2016. Tesla only sold 32 vehicles during those months. Conversely, in March, just prior to the new legislation, buyers raced to get into new EVs, with a total of 2,939 deliveries.

The South China Morning Post reported:

“Scaling down Tesla’s operation in Hong Kong is a natural and logical consequence if the number of customers has dwindled prompted by a reduction of government incentives. Without government support, who is ­willing to invest in green technology?”

Hong Kong officials claim that the EV credit was removed mostly due to its benefit being limited to upper-class consumers, as well as growing traffic congestion in the area. Last year, prior to the elimination of the incentive, there were 10,589 electric cars registered in Hong Kong, most of which were Telsa Model S and X vehicles. Essentially, the Silicon Valley automaker was becoming too popular in Hong Kong, and too many Tesla vehicles were being sold in the area. The Post continued:

“The sale of Tesla cars in one month was equal to the annual sales figure of some petrol car brands. They all complained that the rapid growth of Tesla these few years had made their lives really difficult.”

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has previously referred to Hong Kong as a “beacon city” for EV adoption, but now, it seems the opposite is true. The Post reached out to Tesla for comment. The automaker replied:

“We remain hopeful that the government will continue to encourage more electric vehicles on the road and preserve Hong Kong’s lead in clean, sustainable living.”

A multi-institution team of scientists led by Texas A&M University chemist Sarbajit Banerjee has discovered an exceptional metal-oxide magnesium battery cathode material, moving researchers one step closer to delivering batteries that promise higher density of energy storage on top of transformative advances in safety, cost and performance in comparison to their ubiquitous lithium-ion (Li-ion) counterparts.

“The worldwide push to advance renewable energy is limited by the availability of energy storage vectors,” says Banerjee in the team’s paper, published in the journal Chem (“Reversible Mg-Ion Insertion in a Metastable One-Dimensional Polymorph of V2O5”). “Currently, lithium-ion technology dominates; however, the safety and long-term supply of lithium remain serious concerns. By contrast, magnesium is much more abundant than lithium, has a higher melting point, forms smooth surfaces when recharging, and has the potential to deliver more than a five-fold increase in energy density if an appropriate cathode can be identified.”

Ironically, the team’s futuristic solution hinges on a redesigned form of an old Li-ion cathode material, vanadium pentoxide, which they proved is capable of reversibly inserting magnesium ions.

“We’ve essentially reconfigured the atoms to provide a different pathway for magnesium ions to travel along, thereby obtaining a viable cathode material in which they can readily be inserted and extracted during discharging and charging of the battery,” Banerjee says.

This rare phenomenon is achieved by limiting the location of the magnesium ions to relatively uncomfortable atomic positions by design, based on the way the vanadium pentoxide is made — a property known as metastability. This metastability helps prevent the magnesium ions from getting trapped within the material and promotes complete harvesting of their charge-storing capacity with negligible degradation of the material after many charge-recharge cycles.

The Ins and Outs of Intercalation

Banerjee, a Davidson Professor of Science in the Texas A&M Department of Chemistry and an affiliated faculty member in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, has been working for a number of years to better understand ion intercalation — the critical process by which ions like lithium and magnesium move in and out of other materials within intercalation batteries.

Using one of the world’s most powerful soft X-ray microscopes — the Scanning Transmission X-ray Microscope (STXM) and X-ray Emission beamlines — at the Canadian Light Source in tandem with one of the world’s highest resolution aberration-corrected transmission electron microscopes housed at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), Banerjee and collaborators from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the UIC and Argonne National Laboratory were able to observe the unique electronic properties of their novel vanadium pentoxide and directly prove magnesium-ion intercalation into the material. Collectively, the team applied decades of combined experience in materials science to explain the fundamental reasons why this new type of vanadium pentoxide is superior to the old version as well as to Li-ion batteries.

Laptops and cell phones are two examples of the many technologies enabled by the rapid development of the lithium-ion battery, which revolutionized energy storage capacity and rechargeability in comparison to its lead-acid and nickel-metal hydride predecessors. However, given the widespread use of lithium not only in portable electronic devices but increasingly in the much larger batteries required for electric vehicles and grid energy storage, lithium is expected to be in increasingly short supply in the long-term. Furthermore, Li-ion batteries are a risky game, as highlighted by recent widely publicized reports detailed in Scientific American, Reuters and Forbes, for example, in which Li-ion-powered devices have either caught fire or exploded as a result of the fundamental flammability and reactivity of lithium.

“Apart from being much safer for consumer applications, magnesium-ion technology is appealing fundamentally because each magnesium ion gives up two electrons per ion — twice the charge, whereas each lithium ion gives up only one,” says Texas A&M chemistry graduate student and NASA Space Technology Research Fellow Justin Andrews, first author on the team’s paper. “This means that, all other considerations aside, if you can store as much magnesium in a material as you can store lithium, you immediately almost double the capacity of the battery.”

Double the Capacity, Double the Trouble

But for all their perceived advantages, magnesium batteries have proven too good to be true since they were first proposed in the 1990s and essentially sidelined by a variety of problems; primarily, the lack of a suitable cathode, or positive electrode — otherwise known as the part of a battery where the magnesium ions enter during discharge of the battery to power an electronic device and then exit during charging.

“Indeed, the most exciting thing about magnesium ions — namely, that they store twice the charge in battery applications — also forms the basis for the biggest challenge,” says collaborating UIC chemist Jordi Cabana. “The higher charge of the magnesium ions make them ‘stick’ much more strongly with surrounding atoms.”

In other words, Banerjee says, the magnesium ions get waylaid as they are traversing through the paths within the cathode material. Their sluggish movement is what makes it so difficult to make viable magnesium batteries.

“In many structures, some of these interactions are very favorable, meaning that the magnesium is quite happy to sit and stay a while in those specific sites,” Andrews explains. “In our material, the magnesium is ‘frustrated’ as it moves through the lattice, because it encounters many less-than-optimal environments. In this sense, it is more than happy to just keep moving right along, leading to an improvement in capacity and diffusion.”

The team’s National Science Foundation-funded research features two additional current and former Texas A&M graduate students, Abhishek Parija and Peter M. Marley, respectively. David Prendergast, a Facility Director at Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry, a U.S. Department of Energy National User Facility for Nanoscale Science Research, helped the Texas A&M team design and interpret their calculations, which were experimentally verified in part by Fakra using Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source along with structural data collected at Argonne National Lab’s Advanced Photon Source. Atomic resolution images of the new form of vanadium pentoxide were collected in collaboration with UIC physicist Robert F. Klie and physics graduate student Arijita Mukherjee and show direct evidence of magnesium intercalated within the material. Battery measurements that show reversibility and confirm the robustness of the cathode material complete the story and were conducted in collaboration with Cabana and former Cabana group member Hyun Deog Yoo.

“On paper, magnesium batteries are highly desirable because they promise greater energy density on top of the ability to solve several of the key issues researchers — and unfortunately consumers — are discovering with lithium-ion batteries, including cost, safety, and performance at the most fundamental levels,” Andrews says. “But the shift from lithium- to magnesium-ion technologies is not straightforward, and the many problems encountered when designing magnesium-ion cathodes have stymied the development of these more sustainable and safer batteries.”

Working Toward a Safer Energy Future

Andrews says the team’s research marks an important turning point in the field because it represents a significant advance toward solving the cathode problem while also highlighting the inherent advantages of using much more imaginative, metastable materials like this new form of vanadium pentoxide. But even he admits there’s much more work to do before this particular ’90s trend comes back in vogue.

“While this research has provided a great deal of insight, there are still several other fundamental problems to overcome before magnesium batteries become a reality,” Andrews adds. “Nevertheless, this work moves magnesium batteries one step closer to reality — namely, a reality where batteries would be less-expensive, lighter and safer for allowing for easier adoption to large-area formats necessary for electric vehicles and to store energy generated by solar and wind sources.”

The new age energy storage bandwagon has quite possibly hit the buffers, courtesy of a legislative amendment in the polymetallic-rich Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

The DRC’s parliament voted to repeal cornerstone mining law imposed in 2002 giving resource companies a secure operational space guaranteeing tax-free operations for at least 10 years.

The slew of law amendments announced by the DRC on 27 January includes a tax hike from 2% to 3.5% on all mining, the removal or previously-expected tax amnesties and the introduction of a so-called “super profits tax” of 50% if commodity prices rise by 25% over-and-above what was estimated in resource feasibility studies.

Given the sharp increase in cobalt, lithium, copper and gold prices since 2016, the law changes effectively open-up existing mining companies based in the DRC to a significantly higher tax burden and sudden intangible uncertainty within billion-dollar projects currently in mid-construction.

It is feared the law changes will push some projects outside of economic viability and throws doubt on how profitable large miners such a Glencore, BHP and Ivanhoe can be in the DRC.

Cobalt prices have blitzed all analyst estimates, growing from around $20,000 per tonne in January 2016 to around $80,000 today – making the DRC’s law changes uniquely influential and hard-hitting for global commodity markets.

The new legislation directly impacts large miners first and foremost given their comparatively larger mining volumes and operating profit margins; with energy shares reeling since the legislative announcement.